SAFEHOLD
1/1
'Safehold' (2024), Oliver Savariego, Anika de Ruyter, Rachel Mackie. Photo by Gregory Lorenzutti
Created by choreographer Sandra Parker in collaboration with composer Lawrence Harvey, SAFEHOLD is a new choreographic work drawing on themes of collaboration and unity, performed by dancers Anika de Ruyter, Rachel Mackie and Oliver Savariego.
Using exacting physicality and rigorous choreography, in SAFEHOLD, the dancers try to support, synchronise, and rely on each other, testing the limits of co-existence while maintaining impregnable and secure physical connections. As the pacing and rhythm intensifies across the hour-long event and the dancers move through a continuum of recursive and ever increasingly complex choreographic patterns, the work of maintaining the safety of the ‘hold’ is put to the test. The demands inflicted – to carry on, maintain equilibrium and cooperation, and sustain the performance – considers the scaffolding we rely on when seeking unity and the ‘common good’. SAFEHOLD examines our feeling and actual capacity for trust and reliance on the collective, evaluating what we deem to be safe for all on a human, bodily level.
Choreographer: Sandra Parker
Composer and Sound Designer: Lawrence Harvey
Dancers: Anika de Ruyter, Rachel Mackie, Oliver Savariego
Sound Engineers: Nicole Halford, David Turner
Costume: Ivy Hinkley
Read More
Sandra Parker – Choreographer
Sandra Parker creates rigorous choreographic works, characterised as continuous in form but prismatic in structure. Her practice focuses on attuning attention beyond the immediate, revealing the limitations, vulnerabilities and potentials of the body and subject in the contemporary world. Throughout her career she has presented work in Australia, France, Germany, the US and Asia, and has made a prolific body of work including 16 full length choreographic works, as well as numerous performance-installations and commissions for leading galleries and museums and Australian and international dance companies. Recent projects include ‘TEMPORARY HOLD’, a durational performance-installation at Temperance Hall, South Melbourne, created during a City of Melbourne Boyd Studio residency with funding support from the City of Port Phillip and the Besen Family Foundation; the development of this new work ‘Safehold’ through the inaugural The Australian Ballet residency; ‘Yield to Resistance’ (4 hr durational performance installation), Dancehouse and Temperance Hall, 2022, funded by the Australia Council, Creative Victoria and the City of Port Phillip, winning the 2022 Green Room Award for ‘Best Choreography’.
Lawrence Harvey – Composer
Lawrence Harvey is a composer, sound designer and director of SIAL Sound Studios, School of Design, RMIT University. He curates and directs public concerts and exhibitions on SIAL Sound Studios speaker orchestra. Harvey has collaborated in performances and exhibitions, teaching and research with musicians and artists, interior, digital and industrial designers, and architects. In addition to electroacoustic compositions, he has produced gallery and urban sound installations, radiophonic works, spatial sound designs for VR and theatre, and performed around Melbourne, Australia and in Seoul, Huddersfield, The Hague and Vienna. His writing, teaching
and post-graduate supervisions explore spatial sound composition and performance, soundscape studies and sound as a model for other cultural practices. https://sialsound.studio
Anika de Ruyter – Dancer
Anika de Ruyter is a dance artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). Upon graduation from the Victoria College of the Arts, Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance) in 2019 they were awarded the Orloff Family Charitable Trust Scholarship in Dance for excellence. Since graduation de Ruyter has worked with artists such as Alisdair Macindoe, Rhys Ryan, Gabriella Imrichova and Sandra Parker. Dance allows de
Ruyter to explore the body and its functions in an expression that few other practices can facilitate. Dance provides access to corporeal history and the stories that have been embedded and stored in the body through experience, whilst simultaneously generating physicalised retellings of these stories through virtuosic expression. The body’s history informs embodied response. De Ruyter’s practice seeks methods of articulating this process.
Rachel Mackie – Dancer
Rachel Mackie is a dance artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. She graduated from the VCA in 2020 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance). Recent performance highlights include Collision by Jo Lloyd (2022), object-shun by Erin O’Rourke (2022), and A.I.D by Alisdair Macindoe (2022). Rachel also performed in Silhouette for the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival (2020) and Colossus by Stephanie Lake (Melbourne Fringe Festival 2018, Melbourne International Arts Festival 2019). Rachel was a member of youth dance company Yellow Wheel between 2016-2019, and toured with the Company to Mparntwe/Alice Springs in 2019. Rachel is currently
interested in working with improvisational modes and supports her practice with investigations of multiple somatic practices. In November 2023 Rachel performed in Sandra Parker’s ‘Temporary Hold’.
Oliver Savariego – Dancer
Oliver Savariego is a dancer and choreographer based in Naarm/Melbourne, working in queer and experimental forms. A graduate of both Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year in 2015 and the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017, he works, creates and collaborates extensively in the Naarm dance community and abroad. He created a short work in 2018 with Stuart Shugg in residence at Bennington College, performed later at WeisAcres in New York City. He created and performed “Surface Area” in collaboration with Chloe Arnott and most recently created “Creche”. He has worked with Phillip Adams, Shelley Lasica, Jo Lloyd, Melanie Lane, Deanne Butterworth, Rafael Bonachela and many others.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body and supported by The Australian Ballet Residency Program 2022; the City of Melbourne Arts Grants; Chunky Move's Minimax program; LGI through a studio residency at WXYZ Studios and was created with the support of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship. This project is supported by SIAL Sound Studios, RMIT University.