Nielson Studio, Sydney Dance Company, Sydney.
20 September 2025.
DirtyFeet’s Out of the Studio remains one of Sydney’s most vital choreographic incubators, a space where emerging artists can take creative risks and invite audiences into the raw, early stages of their ideas. The 2025 season presented two works-in-progress that could not have been more different in subject matter or tone: Cassidy McDermott-Smith’s Pull Me Closer and Shyamla’s Girmitiya. Together, they made for an evening that was both speculative and deeply personal, asking us to look outward into the cosmos and inward into the weight of history.
Mentored by Rhiannon Newton, McDermott-Smith’s Pull Me Closer sought to embody planetary forces as love stories, using astrophysics as a poetic frame for human entanglement. Four dancers (Madelene Backen, Mitchell Christie, Frances Orlina and Remy Rochester) entered tentatively, arms raised as if weighing or lifting unseen celestial bodies. The imagery was clear: the push and pull of gravity, the erratic orbit of planets circling an unseen centre.
The work unfolded with a steady arc. From isolated gestures, the dancers began to align side by side, rotating as though caught in an orbital path, before spilling into moments of interaction – collisions, sudden separations, and embraces. At different points, two duos performed lifts that spiralled into spinning embraces, moments that distilled the work’s central theme: the delicate tension between attraction and instability, gravity and release.
While the structure and mood shifts were well-crafted, the movement vocabulary itself often felt too familiar. Some phrase-work resembled standard contemporary sequences that didn’t always feel anchored in the work’s planetary metaphor. Yet, the distinct highlight moments – such as the spinning lifts and sudden collisions – showed where the choreography’s imagery and physicality aligned most strongly. Building on these kinds of embodied metaphors could give the work a more singular and memorable movement language. The concept was clear, and the score (Grand River’s Tuning the Wind and John Tejada’s The Dream) provided an elegant propulsion, but further development is needed to make the movement as distinctive as the forces it seeks to embody.
If McDermott-Smith looked to the skies, Shyamla’s Girmitiya was rooted in the soil – in memory, labour, and the silenced stories of Indian indentured workers transported to Fiji under colonial rule. Mentored by Christopher Gurusamy, and drawing on her own family history, Shyamla interwove personal testimony with endangered Tamil artforms, live percussion (performed by Janakan Suthanthirarai), and traditional practices such as Parai drumming and Silambam, once banned under British rule.
Performed in white, Indian-styled costumes that resonates with multiple readings – sugar, whiteness, colonial assimilation – Shyamla embodied her family’s fractured lineage. She spoke of her grandmother, sent to Fiji as a teenager, forced to resist the advances of her captors; of her grandfather, crippled by sugarcane labour; and of her own grief at being the first in her family to speak only English. Her storytelling was arresting, especially when paired with symbolic actions: adding rocks into a tin can around her neck as punishment for speaking Indian language, pouring a kilo of sugar into a bowl and then pouring it from her own hand to draw what seemed a cultural pattern, to tell the story of her own journey in a controlled and mesmerising action – a quiet act of reclamation.
The work is strongest in its narrative clarity and in the layering of sound, percussion, and text. The movement vocabulary, however, is less defined. While the inclusion of traditional forms is important, they could be pushed further to become more interesting choreographically. It was very mime-like, there is more to be explored in the movement vocabulary, which may increase its impact. Even so, Girmitiya is already a powerful work-in-progress, heartfelt, bringing awareness to a part of history not widely told, although not far from our own home, and deeply personal. It honours silenced histories while creating new spaces for cultural resistance and renewal.
Together, these two works exemplify what Out of the Studio does best: giving artists space to test, falter, get feedback, and discover. McDermott-Smith’s Pull Me Closer stretches towards the cosmic and conceptual, while Shyamla’s Girmitiya is grounded in lived history and ancestral memory. Both invite us to imagine futures beyond the studio walls – one written in the stars, the other inscribed in the body.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
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