Sydney Dance Company’s New Breed is an annual showcase of some of Australia’s most exciting emerging choreography. With New Breed, Australian choreographers are given a unique opportunity to collaborate with Sydney Dance Company and the outstanding contemporary dance company members.
This year’s New Breed choreographers are Amber McCartney, Siobhan McKenna, Dean Elliott and Piran Scott, who will all debut new works at Carriageworks from 4 – 14 December. Here, Dance Informa speaks with McCartney and McKenna about their choreographic style and what we can expect from their latest work.
Can you please tell us a bit about yourself?
Siobhan McKenna
“I grew up in regional New South Wales, Yuin country, just inland from Eden. I started dancing there at a local dance school called Wyndham School of Dance, doing ballet and then a bit of tap, jazz and a bit of Irish. In high school, I joined Fling Physical Theatre, which is a youth company based out of Bega. That was really amazing, it showed me that there was a pathway in contemporary dance, with some members having gone to VCA, which I went to for my tertiary training, and have been based down here in Melbourne ever since.
Amber McCartney
“I trained in Wollongong as a teenager, did a year in Sydney full-time, and then moved to Melbourne in 2010 to do a Bachelor of Dance at VCA. Ever since I graduated, I’ve been pushing to become an independent artist, worked with lots of amazing people, a couple of different companies in Australia, lots of touring. And this whole time, I’ve been developing my own practice. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been making a series of solos. This is sort of my first time making work on company dancers. I’m used to making work on myself. I come into the studio alone and I sometimes don’t even have my collaborators in the room, and I thrive in that environment. So, this is big for me to be able to translate my practice onto these incredible technicians.”
Tell us about the work you are creating for New Breed 2024?
McKenna
“My work for New Breed is a continuation of my interests in communication, rhythm and the of blending of language and movement. I’ve been thinking about the similarities of paying attention when you’re having a conversation to how I pay attention when I’m dancing with a group of people. I’ve also been thinking about active listening and the cyclical back and forth nature of communication and conversation. So whilst the work hasn’t been made yet, I think these are the ideas that I’ll be coming into the studio with, and I’m excited to see what emerges.”
McCartney
“I’ve pulled inspiration from a couple of different sources. One of the main ones being parasites — leeches in particular. I’m really interested in parasitic aliens in science fiction. The most iconic one would be the Alien series. You’ve got Facehugger and Chestburster and those are parasitoid parasites – they go inside a vessel or another insect and their larvae feed off the shell, and then they burst through and ultimately kill the host. I’m interested in these aliens because they’re vessels for anything really; they have infinite possibility. Over the past few years, I’ve been making a lot of body horrors. They’re works inspired by the genre body horror, specifically films from the ’80s, which have really amazing special effects. This is before CGI really took off and the effects were real, tactile, super gross and kind of funny. One of the films I’m looking at is called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s based on a novel – alien seeds from out of space, which form these pods. If a human falls asleep, then the pod forms a blurry version of that human, a perfect biological replica. The human is eradicated and the alien lives as a duplicate in their place, except they don’t have any human emotion or empathy. So it’s quite spooky, but I like this sort of shape shifting or transformation theme in body horror.
We’ve got an amazing score, which is inspired by the Psycho shower scene, the violins by Bernard Herrmann. It’s iconic, like screeching. Alisdair Macindoe has created this awesome score for me and his dad, Robert Macindoe is actually the Associate Principal Second Violin in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and he recorded on this track for me, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We used polystyrene and Alisdair played a plastic container, so we’re looking at warping that screeching sound and getting this real uneasy score. The sound will be developed further by Robbie Downing; he will take it on and it’ll flex a little bit throughout the process.”
How would you describe your choreographic style and method(s) you have been using to create your piece?
McKenna
“My choreographic style is quite repetitious, rhythmic, detailed and playful, but it’s really informed by the people that I work with. In the past, I’ve worked really collaboratively with dancers in the studio, so I’m excited to work with the Company dancers. I’ve only worked predominantly in the past with people that I know, whom I have a shared background with, so this is a really new experience. It is often a collective mission making a dance work, especially with a group of people, as everyone brings their energies. I play a lot with repetition as ways of transforming movement and language, and I find the embodied spoken patterns of how we communicate in everyday life really fascinating, and exploring them choreographically to see what comes out. I often record conversations with the group of people I’m working with, and then work with that text by moving to the rhythm of the dialogue, picking out certain aspects of it and creating movements that have more of a literal relationship to that text. I take inspiration from musical patterns and inserting movement into those patterns. I’m constantly analysing the material.”
McCartney
“I usually begin with something added to the body, some sort of volume in a costume or an additive, like a prosthetic or a mask or something that is a vessel for transformation. And then, because I’m usually alone, I video improvisation, and go back and watch every moment and notate any split second that confuses me or surprises me, and try to replicate that. The harder it is, that’s a good thing. If I can’t figure out the pathway, then I know that it’s successful. Additionally, I’m presenting a series of scores which have really strict parameters around them, like a level parameter or some sort of dynamic that they can then build on. Improvisation really amplifies your presence, and I find you have to be present in every single moment, you can never go into autopilot. I like putting my body in compromising situations and pushing the limits.
For this work in particular, the costume element is integral, but it’s kind of a mystery. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s very important to the work. I created a prototype and then I got to work with Aleisa Jelbert, and she elevated it. Seeing something that I have been imagining for a while really come to life, I’m excited about that. It’ll be there for the dancers to work with from day one.”
What does this opportunity mean for you?
McKenna
“I feel so lucky to be part of the New Breed season. I’m alongside three other really amazing artists, and I’ve witnessed so many other artists who have come through this program who I admire a lot, so it feels like a real privilege to be invited to work on Sydney Dance Company. I’ve only worked independently with people that I know so it’s going to be a really new experience for me. I’ll probably learn a lot, and it feels really exciting.”
McCartney
“Sydney Dance Company is massive for me, and I haven’t really shown my work in Sydney because I’ve been in Victoria since 2010. I’m really excited that my family is going to come up and see the strange things that I do. However, this is a real test for me, to see if I can make on other bodies. If I can, I feel like the possibilities will expand, particularly in improving my collaborative approach to work. If I can do this, I can dream bigger. But it is also scary because when I make work, I’m fairly improvisation based. This is a small timeframe to teach a practice that is based on improvisation. But the perks are that if I’m able to narrow down the parameters of a texture, I can pass that on, and they can riff on that. I’m learning a lot about my process in this, in that it is quite intuitive. I like to keep it open enough to surprise myself.”
Who/what are the biggest influencers to your choreographic voice, past and present, and how has choreographic history informed you?
McKenna
“The way I move and my interests as an artist have been influenced by my training at VCA, which focused on contemporary ballet choreography and somatic practices, with links to the post-modern New York lineage, along with my background – growing up doing Irish, tap, and ballet of course. I’m also inspired by my study in music and singing, and then being based in Melbourne, there are so many amazing artists here, some of which taught me at VCA like Jo Lloyd, Stephanie Lake, Antony Hamilton, Lucy Guerin. In 2020, I met Ros Crisp and did a few workshops with her, and she’s amazing. I just went overseas and did the ImPulsTanz FestivalAtlas program, and I think that kind of ongoing engagement with lots of different dance artists doing different things always has an influence.”
McCartney
“I think the best thing about being independent is I’ve been able to layer the sediments of other processes, which has become this big melding pot. When I first left uni, I worked a lot with Prue Lang, who really taught me a lot about improvisation and the sensory or imaginative aspects of it. I’ve worked with Antony Hamilton. We share this passion for the hybrid human, he will often add things to the body, and he has this really beautiful aesthetic that I love. I also love working for Lucy Guerin because she’s wonderfully dark and can be quite spooky in her work, but she’s also very technical and really values physicality. I think that’s where my passion for special effects comes in that period, because it’s real material creating fiction. And that is ultimately what I want to do with my body, is innovate my humanness just with the stuff that is here rather than adding technology to it.”
Where do you see Australian choreography of the future headed, and why will it be unique?
McKenna
“Continuance of evolution…Art generally reflects things about the world or the context that we live in right now, fantasy worlds or worlds of the past, or the future. I can imagine technology is going to continue to evolve. There are so many amazing artists like working at the intersection of dance and technology. However, I think there will still be an interest in returning to our bodies and experiencing dancing, at least I hope so. At the moment, there’s not a lot of resources, and perhaps it will mean people will find alternative ways to work, and we’ll see dance in new spaces or people approaching it differently because of this, which will all contribute to the uniqueness and development of Australian choreography. Interdisciplinary practice, cross-cultural collaboration, working collectively, First Nations voices, which is so important. Lots of things could happen.”
McCartney
“When I see the younger or new voices coming up, the thing that I really admire about them is their versatility. They have access to so many different genres, and I think it’s really informing the upcoming choreographic voices, which is super cool. And I think accessibility creates less fear. I think, for me, maybe because not knowing the unknown seemed more challenging, but when you have access to all these styles it seems achievable.”
Read about the other New Breed choreographers here.
For tickets and more information on New Breed 2024, visit www.sydneydancecompany.com/performance/new-breed-2024.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
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