Eternity Playhouse, Sydney.
1 October 2025.
What happens before the performance begins? Overture, directed and choreographed by Tegan Jeffrey-Rushton, takes audiences into the shadowed spaces around the show – foyers, stairwells, dressing rooms and wings – to reveal the private dramas that precede theatre’s bright lights. Co-produced with Neale Whittaker and presented by Idea Festival and Form Dance Projects, this immersive contemporary dance work imagines the theatre itself as a haunted body, alive with memories of performers, audiences and unseen labour.
In her program note, Jeffrey-Ruston writes of “the loudest silence in an empty theatre,” a silence that Overture attempts to give form. Across a series of encounters, four characters – a performer, a bartender, a cleaner and a stage manager – are joined by an ensemble of ‘audience’ figures, blurring the line between who watches and who performs.
The piece begins in the foyer, where spectators cluster in dim red light. Robert McLean’s ‘Quell’ – The Cleaner – moves through with quiet choreography, tidying and wiping, his gestures edging toward abstraction. Soon, Neale Whittaker enters as ‘John’ – The Bartender – and his actions – polishing glasses, pacing the bar – are infused with hip hop’s sharp isolations and pauses, a moving spotlight shone on him by The Cleaner. He breaks into song, a moment of longing that promises a musical motif but is never returned to. This sense of threads left hanging becomes a recurring tension in the work.
The arrival of Holly Finch as ‘Ginnie’ – The Performer – jolts the atmosphere as she peers over the balustrade. Emerging puppet-like from the stairwell in maroon velvet, chiffon sleeves and smeared cabaret makeup, she evokes both clown and doll. Finch’s extraordinary physical control allows her to flop and crumple while remaining sharply articulate, her facial expressions flipping in ventriloquist-dummy shifts between joy and despair. She anchors the work with a portrait of fragility, grotesquerie and theatrical exhaustion.
The audience is then guided upstairs, past posters and discarded shoes and clothing, into a cramped dressing room. Finch smokes and stares into the mirror, trapped in hopelessness, looking at her face at times as if she views a stranger in the mirror. Yukino McHugh’s ‘Helen’ – The Stage Manager – bustles in, coaxing and commanding her to prepare. Whittaker’s Bartender tends silently, leaving fresh roses, typing a love note on the typewriter that is on the dressing table, embodying unspoken devotion. McLean’s Cleaner lingers with quieter affection. Their interactions across benches and chairs are deftly choreographed, the men spinning and weaving with weightless strength. The triangle of desire – the bartender’s open love, the cleaner’s shy care, the stage manager’s frustrated professionalism – builds around Finch’s performer, who resists all calls to “go on”.
In a backstage utility room, McLean takes centre stage. His solo with broom and walls is passionate yet eloquent, claiming space for invisible labour, and unrequited love. Soon, the characters converge on the theatre’s actual stage, the audience facing both them and the cavernous empty auditorium. Here, the dynamics crystallise: the bartender’s love, the stage manager’s demands, the performer’s listless resistance. A particularly striking image sees McHugh descend from the top tiers of seating, commandingly standing on top of chairs, sliding and rolling her body down rows of chairs, fluid and relentless in her pursuit to keep the show moving, her dominant role in keeping the space together before a performance evident.
At this point, the work shifts. Doors open, and an ensemble portraying ‘The Audience’ floods in: the critic, celebrities, friends, families, lovers. Dressed in casual 1920s-tinged attire, they parody spectatorship itself before launching into an extended choreographic sequence.
This number is inventive: applause becomes a gestural motif, bodies crowd-surf across rows, clusters break into canon, and unaison has a strong effect in the tiered seating. At times, only feet and ankles poke above chairs, reconfiguring the visual field of the auditorium. It is witty, ambitious, and cleverly staged.
Yet, its length and tone disrupt the fabric of the work; it feels imported from another aesthetic universe. While one could argue the rupture intentionally mirrors the gulf between backstage intimacy and onstage spectacle, the tonal break weakens rather than enriches the dramaturgy. Just as the work’s earlier threads risked dispersal, here, too, the clarity of focus wavers.
Finally, as we are turned back to the stage, Finch’s performer reappears, poised at a microphone stand, ready to sing. The blackout cuts her off.
It is a hauntingly appropriate ending: the overture halts before the show begins, leaving us suspended in that indeterminate zone between anticipation and fulfilment. The final gesture affirms Jeffrey-Rushton’s premise that theatre is not only what is seen under lights, but also the charged pauses, the residues and refusals that frame it.
Overture is a work of clear ambition. Its promenade form reconfigures the familiar architecture of the Eternity Playhouse, drawing spectators through spaces rarely seen by the viewers. It pays homage to the ghosts of theatre, to the euphoric highs and isolating lows of performers, and to the invisible labour that sustains the stage.
Its strengths are considerable. Finch’s magnetic performance fuses technical brilliance with character immersion; McHugh’s physical fluidity carries dramatic weight; Whittaker and McLean shape tender counterpoints through their duets and solos. The ensemble sequence, despite its disjunction, demonstrates choreographic imagination and boldness in scale.
Where the work falters is coherence. Motifs appear and vanish – Whittaker’s opening song, hints of love left unresolved – while the ensemble ‘Audience’ section overextends and dilutes the work’s atmosphere. These choices blur the dramaturgical through-line, occasionally pulling the piece away from its most potent ideas. Yet, despite its unevenness, Overture lingers. Jeffrey-Rushton succeeds in evoking the hauntedness of the theatre, the tension between glamour and despair, and the private humanity behind the curtain. Like the silence after curtain call, it reverberates in the mind long after the blackout.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
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