Cultural Residues 2020 explores embodied provenance, presentation and representation — history and fake news. Through film projection, sound and live performance, this duet series is imagined as a river that flows and meanders through different landscapes. In a cyclical and mesmeric exploration of time, projected images are both prequel and sequel to live dance at different junctures, creating visual echoes and musical canons.

A rotating cast of Russell Dumas’ remarkable dancers appear on stage, two at a time. The dancers choose the duets as Dumas determines the sequence of events in a largely improvised work that promises no two evenings will be the same. How does an embodied past enter the future other than through the present?

As one of Australia’s most iconic choreographers and pedagogues, Dumas’ seminal body of work has always been inherently about the transmission of practice to and amongst the dancers that he works with. Cultural Residues 2020 exhibits a passing down of knowledge from one body to another, from generation to generation, as historical canon. Testament to kinesthetic intelligence, this deceptively simple work reveals the surprising, and sometimes humorous, poetry of the human body in action.

Choreographer: Russell Dumas
Performers: Jonathan Sinatra, Stuart Shugg, Alexandra Petrarca, David Huggins, Rachel Doust, Megan Payne, Tom Woodman, Chloe Arnott, Rhys Ryan
Design: Simon Lloyd
Sound Design: Ion Pearce