Campbelltown Arts Centre, Western Sydney.
6 November 2025.
In the current landscape of Australian dance, the conditions for independent artists to develop full-length work have narrowed significantly. Against this backdrop, MSTM is both timely and quietly defiant. Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre, the project brought together four artists – Martin del Amo, Sue Healey, Tra Mi Dinh and Mitchell Christie – whose practices span different generations, training lineages and performance histories. The result is not simply a collaboration, but an inquiry into what collaboration can look like when authorship is genuinely shared.
The work begins before the audience enters the theatre. Instead, we are guided into a side space where the performance is already in motion. Projections are placed across the irregular surfaces of the room – bodies walking through bright white space, rolling slowly and viewed from top view, images that gently disorient perspective while amplifying the dancers’ presence in the space. Imagery that disrupts fixed perspective while also grounding the performers within a perceptual environment. Healey’s longstanding engagement with the choreographic potential of film is unmistakable here: attention is invited to detail, and subtle shifts in spatial presence.
Across the room, del Amo moves the letters – M, S, T, M – into various configurations, a quiet yet insistent act of ordering and reordering, before settling into alignment, at which point we are invited to pass through to the main space. The sequence reads as a gesture of attunement, of waiting for something to arrive at its right place.
We are then invited not to our seats, but through a doorway leading directly onto the stage, entering behind the still-closed curtains. The dancers are with us, present but unassertive, sharing the space without performing towards us. Only once everyone has gathered do the curtains open, revealing the seating bank. We cross the stage to take our places. It is a subtle but potent dramaturgical gesture – one that dissolves the usual boundary between those who move and those who watch, inviting the audience into the collaborative environment from which the work was built.
Once inside the theatre, the work unfolds through duets, trios and full quartet configurations, with dancers moving fluidly between dancing and observing. Sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall is not a retreat from action but a choreographic position – evidence of the shared process of looking, responding and attending. The theatre’s architecture becomes part of the score: curtains open and close; dancers negotiate thresholds; proximity and distance are continually recalibrated.
What stands out is how clearly each artist’s choreographic language remains visible. Del Amo’s textured attention to detail, curiosity, and idiosyncratic gesture; Healey’s compositional clarity and spatial attunement; Dinh’s precise yet porous approach to movement; Christie’s spatially explorative phrasing, where expansiveness is held in quiet stillness and patient attention – all are distinct, yet in dialogue. The work does not attempt to merge these approaches into a single unified vocabulary. Instead, it honours difference, tracing how practices intersect, diverge and overlap. Collaboration here is not fusion, but conversation.
A recurring structural device is the return of shared movement phrases introduced early in close alignment with the music. Gestures land precisely with sound and beat at the beginning of segments, but as the phrases and the work progress, this relationship loosens. Gail Priest’s sound design shifts from rhythmic driver to atmospheric field, allowing the movement to find its own internal rhythm. By the later sections, the dancers are not following the music so much as inhabiting it – moving with it, around it, and occasionally in deliberate counterpoint. The sensation is that the choreography has taken on its own breath.
The performances are thoughtful and deeply felt. Dinh and Christie offer a clarity of articulation and responsiveness to detail. Del Amo and Healey embody a grounded maturity – their movement spacious, intelligent, and subtly humorous. A moment in which the younger dancers extend into sustained leg lines while the older pair echo with understated variation speaks softly to time, continuity, and artistic evolution.
The design elements support the work with quiet precision. Frankie Clarke’s lighting sculpts intimacy and expansiveness across the space; Aleisa Jelbart’s costumes allow neutrality without flattening individuality.
MSTM is not a work of spectacle. It is a work of attention – to each other, to the space, to the ongoing act of negotiation that collaboration demands. In offering us this attention, it makes a compelling case for the value of intergenerational exchange and for the continued support of independent practice in Australia’s arts ecology.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
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