culture

On his company’s 10th anniversary, Shaun Parker – one of the stalwarts of Australian contemporary dance – looks over his shapeshifting career. “It’s weird, I didn’t like it. I loved it. You’d think I’d be more terrified, but I think, beginning to sing or dance or act, you’re becoming another role. I love that feeling of becoming someone else.”

With the Covid-19 lockdown forcing Sydney arts precinct Carriageworks into voluntary administration, the embattled cultural sector is bracing for worse to come.

As a homesick teenager from Bendigo, Alice Topp dreamed of dancing with The Australian Ballet. Now she is also a resident choreographer with the company, and only the second woman to hold the title. She speaks about the creative collaboration of her latest work, Logos. “We are in a vulnerable space together, and it’s a safe space and we’re free to have our own voice and it’s a really special journey for me. I can’t imagine creating any other way.”

Community has always been important to dancer and artist Bhenji Ra, who found solidarity in New York’s ballroom culture. In the wake of this summer’s devastating bushfires, she turned her focus back home, to the NSW south coast community that supported her to pursue her dreams. “It was the most incredible New Year’s Eve I’ve had. I’d never felt so intimate with my family. We were all there together – except for my older sister, who lives in Los Angeles – and with our community as well.”

Using dance, Shelley Lasica’s ongoing collaborative project The Design Plot maps the space between the performers and the audience, examining the macro and the micro as part of a whole.

At age 60, dancer and choreographer Yang Liping is still going strong, determined to keep the cultural traditions of China’s ethnic minorities alive. She speaks about her 50-year career and her striking new version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. “I want to fill the movement with traditional culture and art to make it more solid, more relevant, and more how I think contemporary dance should be.”