Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company, Sydney.
14 August 2025.
Sydney Dance Company’s INDance program, supported by the Neilson Foundation and curated by Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela, is now in its fourth year, establishing itself as one of the most vital platforms for independent artists in Australia. Staged in the Neilson Studio, this initiative champions experimentation, diversity and artistic risk-taking.
The opening night of Week 1 delivered two works that couldn’t have been more different in tone and approach – Rebecca Jensen’s Slip and Amy Chang’s [ gameboy ]. Together, they highlighted the breadth of what contemporary dance in Australia can be: eerie, fracture explorations of body and sound on one side, and playful, razor-sharp theatre on the other.
Slip plunged into the porous border between sound and movement, using foley art as its primary language. With Jensen performing, and composer Aviva Endean conjuring the sound to Jensen’s movement from a table of curious props – celery sticks crunching for chip consumption, rubber pipes whooshing for alien head movement, and boots stomping in rhythm with walking – the piece explored how what we hear reshapes what we think we see. The opening image of the two artists huddled over an iPhone screen set up this interplay, through its intimacy was likely lost on much of the audience seated further back.
At its strongest, the work achieved an unsettling transformation: Jensen’s pliant body morphing under the influence of alien soundscapes, or else dictating the rhythm of Endean’s textures. The “slips” – those moments when movement and sound fell out of alignment – were not accidents, but intentional disruptions that jarred the viewer into noticing the constructedness of the performance. Similarly, the medieval gown and braided crown felt deliberately anachronistic, inserting a rupture that made the body itself seem out of place, out of time.
The projection of watery figures towards the end of the work crystallised this point. Rather than syncing into their dance, Jensen’s refusal to align emphasised the impossibility of matching reality with its digital echoes. The result was eerie and destabilising – the body glitching against its own image, inhabiting multiple times and spaces but never fitting neatly into any of them.
Costume changes layered further textures into the work, suggesting shifting identities or new levels of reality. At time, the repetition of movement sequences risked dulling the impact, but the deliberate disjointedness served the concept: this was not a body presenting wholeness or purity, but one forever faltering, trying, recalibrating.
Endean’s unwavering focus at her desk anchored the piece, making the connection between dancer and sound-maker as hypnotic as it was unstable. Even in its most unsettling passages, Slip resonated as a bold experiment in dissonance, rupture, and the fragmented realities of our time.
If Slip was spectral and unsettling, Chang’s [ gameboy ] burst onto the stage with irreverence, colour, and humour. Performed by William “Billy” Keohavong and Ko Yamada, the piece dropped two avatars into the game of life and gleefully subjected them to increasingly absurd “levels” of challenge.
Inspired by Japanese game shows, internet culture, and video games, the work was a fusion of theatre, street dance and pop. The avatars raced across a path of lego barefoot, attempted to pick up apples with their necks whilst wearing headgear, and endured penalties in losing the round by having to brush their teeth with wasabi washed down with Pocari Sweat. It was gleefully painful to watch, especially when the punishment was repeated – a darkly comic cycle of play, loss, and consequence.
The staging was deceptively simple: a stark, white lit, box-like feel to the space, evoking the screen space a video game might inhabit (lighting design by Theodore Carroll). Sound designer Jackson Garcia and contributing composer Maxwell “Thy Flood” Douglas layered in repetitive game beats and retro ’80s/’90s cues, and each return to the walking sequence that reset the “level” gave the structure clarity, like hitting respawn over and over. The starkness of the space lent structure to the repetition, and the soundtrack emphasized the game-like elements.
Keohavong and Yamada were exceptional, their facial expressions and comic timing as sharp as their physicality. Their fusion into a shadowy, eight-limbed monster behind the scrim was both funny and uncanny, and the final pop number – cheesy, triumphant, drenched in kawaii aesthetics – sealed the piece with a punchline.
Chang’s work does more than parody; it cleverly folds Asian cultural aesthetics into contemporary storytelling, making commentary on resilience, absurdity, and the consequences of action. The humour, physical rigour, and the sly cultural nods gave [ gameboy ] a distinctive voice and an immediate connection with the audience.
As an opening double bill, Slip and [ gameboy ] could hardly be more different – one abstract, eerie, and meditative, the other playful, sharp, and theatrical. Together they embodied what INDance promises: a space where independent artists can take risks, test ideas, and offer audiences a glimpse of dance’s ever-expanding future.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
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