Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company, Sydney.
27 September 2025.
Presented as a part of Sydney Fringe Festival, Move FM is the latest offering from Future Makers, Dance Makers Collective’s platform for emerging choreographers and performers. Since its founding in 2019, Future Makers has sought to create a space where young artists can explore collectively, take risks, and work toward public presentation. At the Neilson Studio, the results were laid bare: an evening of short contemporary works that promised eclectic energy and experimental spirit, but also revealed the challenges of moving from concept to craft.
What united the program was its appetite for ideas. Each choreographer was grappling with themes that matter to their generation – social media, intimacy, identity, friendship, sexuality – and there was no lack of enthusiasm on stage. Yet, the works often felt like first drafts: sketches brimming with possibility but rarely deepened into fully realised statements. Still, there was enough raw talent, risk-taking, and curiosity to show that the seeds of future voices are being planted.
PLATINUM (choreographed by Hannah Brookes)
Hannah Brookes opened the night with the most frenetic energy of the program. PLATINUM set its sights on the hyper-curated world of social media, where being “cool” is a full-time performance. The use of an iPhone to project images onto the screen was clever, rooting the audience in the language of selfies, TikToks, and endless online presence.
The performers began with humour and charm, playing up the ritual of posing, filming, and being “cute together.” But as the work built towards chaos – frenzied movement, rapid cuts, exaggerated displays – the escalation felt more like repetition at a higher volume. The piece lacked an arc beyond acceleration, and what started as a sharp satire slipped into monotony.
Still, PLATINUM captured something undeniably current: the exhausting demand to always be visible, sexy, popular, and consumable. It’s a generational pressure ripe for critique, but Brookes’ next step could be to shape that raw energy into more layered dramaturgy.
Between One and Ten (choreographed by Voureen NiCainin)
Voureen NiCainin’s Between One and Ten struck the most playful note of the evening. Beginning with the motif of birthdays, the work incorporated dialogue, hats, and a childlike sense of occasion. Gradually, the theme expanded to friendship and connection, with performers offering personal reflections on their closest bonds.
A highlight was the use of party hats as props – cone-shaped, lit from within, used in blackout moments to create a constellation of glowing points. It was a simple but imaginative gesture.
Although light in tone and content, Between One and Ten showed a choreographer thinking about how theatrical devices can be used to shape mood and atmosphere. It demonstrated that experimentation need not always be heavy-handed, and that play has its own rigour.
Antics of Modern Romantics (choreographed by Frances Orlina)
Frances Orlina gave us messier, more theatrical territory. Antics of Modern Romantics was a solo performed with a giant teddy bear: sometimes cuddled, sometimes climbed on, and throughout, spoken to as a confidant. The bear became both partner and antagonist, a figure for affection and frustration.
The use of monologue – an intimate description of a romantic relationship – was the work’s most daring choice. Yet, it was also unsettling. The story felt more suited to someone in their 30s than to such a young performer. It spoke to experiences that felt heavy for her age. If it was adopted from elsewhere, it sat awkwardly, making the piece feel less authentic.
What did land was Orlina’s physical clarity. She is a strong, articulate dancer, and her ability to manipulate the teddy – hoist it, collapse against it, toss it aside – created arresting stage images. With dramaturgical refinement, the idea of the teddy bear as stand-in for absent intimacy could grow into a compelling solo.
Still, We Move (choreographed by Kate Clerkin)
In sharp contrast, Kate Clerkin’s Still, We Move was neat, and geometric. The dancers appeared in white shorts, black trousers, and ties, a uniform aesthetic that evoked corporate office works or bureaucratic drones. This gave the work an immediate visual hook, suggesting themes of conformity and individuality.
Clerkin built striking tableaux: dancers in squared formations, broken apart by solos that briefly hinted at personality, and that consisted of a very interesting movement vocabulary that shows promise. There were glimpses of characterisation – small rebellions, flashes of individuality – that suggested the possibility of a narrative through-line. Yet, these possibilities were left unexplored. Instead, the work circled back to its initial ideas, creating a polished but static rhythm.
It waw easy to admire the discipline and visual clarity, but the choreography remained at the surface. At times, it felt close to an advanced eisteddfod routine: clean, well-rehearsed, aesthetically strong, but without the development that might elevate it into something resonant.
Come Together (choreographed by Layla Meadows)
Layla Meadow’s Come Together was a welcome study in understatement. A gentle almost meditative exploration, it focused on the textures of bodies moving together: pale costumes, layered fabrics, and shifting group shapes that felt organic rather than imposed. Unlike other works, there was no obvious theme or narrative, and this absence was refreshing. The piece invited the audience to watch movement for its own sake, to tune into the subtle changes of weight and form.
The final gesture – performers walking off embracing in pairs – introduced an explicit relational layer that felt tacked on. The simplicity of the movement study was enough on its own, and the addition diluted its purity. Nevertheless, Clerkin’s quiet voice offered balance to a program otherwise filled with noise and statement.
And it. (choreographed by Heather Maitland)
The closing solo, And It., was the most confrontational work of the night. The performer stripped off their singlet to reveal tape strapped across their chest, presenting an androgynous body in tension with binary expectations. The movement was trashy, raw, and tinged with anger.
The intention was clear: to challenge, to provoke, to force the audience into discomfort. But the bluntness of the delivery risked reducing the complexity of queer and non-binary identity into a single emotional register. Where a range of emotions, or nuance might have expanded the work, frustration dominated.
Heather Maitland was compelling as a performer – elsewhere in the program they showed strength in ensemble contexts – but as a choreographer, the work felt more like catharsis than composition. Anger is valid and vital, but its translation into form is what gives it staying power.
Taken together, Move FM offered exactly what its title suggests: motion, energy, fragments of possibility. What was missing was a sense of journey. Too often, works relied on surface gestures – social media tropes, teddy bears, office uniforms, birthday hats, identity statements – without pushing deeper into what those images could reveal.
What these emerging choreographers need now is not more tricks or fashionable moves, but mentorship: guidance in developing ideas, refining structure, and crafting journeys that take audiences somewhere unexpected. Not necessarily narrative journeys, but choreographic ones – arcs of tension, surprise, transformation.
Still, there is something invigorating about seeing raw ideas placed before an audience. The night captured the urgency of young makers trying to find their voices in a landscape that can be both daunting and exhilarating. Future Makers deserves credit for giving them a platform, and audiences deserve to see this process as it unfolds.
If these artists can shift from worrying about what they think audiences want to see, to discovering what they themselves truly want to say, then the promise glimpsed in Move FM will ripen into something remarkable. For now, the works remain sketches – but sketches worth watching, because they hint at the contours of Sydney’s choreographic future.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
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