If you’re an up and coming dance maker of any kind, learning and seeking inspiration from others is a vital way to continue to grow your craft.
As part of our series with AustralianSuper, helping you kick start your career, independent choreographer and dancer Amrita Hepi sits down with three colleagues who inspire her, to find out what makes them tick, to help you find inspiration for your next endeavour!
Natalie Abbott
Nat is a powerhouse. I first met her at a Justin Bieber dance class and fell a little bit in love, as she creates sensorial performance experiences like none other.
She is committed to the idea that EVERYTHING IS CHOREOGRAPHY, including light, sound, movement and design and she uses this vision when devising work.
Her work deals with endurance based practices, exhausting bodies to create new dialogues between the audience and performer. She is currently interested in failure and how this can be so rich within the performance context.
Her research currently involves exploring how to perform ‘authentic’ failure, how to tempt failure to occur. Within this research, Natalie is interested in pulling apart attachment to the preconceived, of allowing and celebrating something that is imperfect and exploring the choreographic potential within that.
How would you describe the dance you make?
I make sensorial dance that explores lo-fi spectacle, physical failure, the idea that you can ‘fail good’ and post-virtuosity. I work collaboratively with lights, sound and design incorporating them as essential choreographic elements. My shows are on the extra-experimental side of contemporary.
What changes would you like to see happen within the dance industry in Australia?
More equality. Less competition. More community.
I actually think there is a lot of really great work being made in Australia right now. I am based in Melbourne and there are so many ideas bouncing around but not enough opportunities to present the work. We are moving into galleries and share spaces to perform for each other, we are making it happen, but more space and more opportunities to present work is something I’d like to see.
I also think we need to work harder at building communities both interstate and nationally. I have started this mission by touring my last show MAXIMUM around to a few major cities and sharing my practice, but also learning from the local dance communities through workshops. I’d do that again, but next time I’m keen to go regional.
What dance artists do you admire?
You of course! You’re on fire Amrita! I am obsessed with Justin Bieber and that clip! JOY JOY!
I love Rebecca Jensen and Sarah Aiken. They are two of my besties, we have all worked together in the past and continue to work together on a project called Deep Soulful sweats, a fake dark yogic celebrity trash ritual. It is always inspiring to be together and bounce ideas off each other.
I also LOVE Michelle Heaven and Yumi Yumiamare for their quirky visions.
Fave dance memory?
Ok, well, you asked… In 2015, I was at Rainbow Serpent Festival. I looked behind me and there was a cop standing there with his can of coke, he looked like he was having fun so I went to share the joy and dance with him and the following happened:
There was so much excitement and joy. The video was on the news the next week. It was super crazy and fun and that’s why I dance: to bring joy, to have fun, to communicate and share experiences.
My other best dance memories would be making my last show MAXIMUM and working with so many different bodybuilders and humans to realise my vision. People are so interesting and will ALWAYS surprise you if you let them!
Angela Goh
Angela Goh is an Australian artist presenting her experimental work in a range of different contexts. Her practice approaches dance and choreography as tools for speculation. She is interested in imagination – its potential to infect the limits of contemporaneity, blur the edges of fact and fiction, and produce transformation at the borders of image and affect.
How would you describe the dance you make?
Maybe the best way to attempt description is to invent some counter genres for three projects I’m currently working on.
I’d place Desert Body Creep in the genre of ‘cute horror’, I would say Predictable Dances is ‘lazy time-travel with a speculative rescue narrative’ and I’d say Uncanny Valley Girl is ‘lo-fi fantasy’ or ‘softcore’, kind of dubious titillation for ordinary machines with a thing for humans.
Mostly I am interested in speculative thinking through which I can find other ways of relating mind to body, reality to fiction, history to future, and image to affect. I’m interested in imagination – not in order to make characters or stories – but as an effective tool to understand and misunderstand the world.
What changes would you like to see happen within the dance industry in Australia?
Well, I don’t really care about ‘the industry’ I care about dance. I care about the minds and bodies that are part of the conspiracy that works towards expanding choreography. I care about dancing for a reason that doesn’t need to be justified but that is made necessary by the moment it finds itself in.
I care about community, and I care about being excited. So, I suppose the best way to answer the question is to say that I’d like the notion of ‘the industry’ not to get in the way of all the things that dance and choreography can produce.
What dance artists do you admire?
Mostly, I am inspired by all my kick a** friends.
Fave dance memory?
I have so many, but at the moment, every new project I am involved in becomes my new favourite. Hopefully this feeling continues. I’d rather be excited than nostalgic.
Taree Sansbury
Taree Sansbury, from Port Adelaide, is a graduate from the four-year diploma of professional dance performance at indigenous dance college NAISDA. Taree is a descendant of the Kaurna, Narungga and Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia and is the recipient of the inaugural Indigenous Residency Scholarship for The Corner Dance Lab 2016.
How would you describe the dance you make?
Quick twitch, fluid and grounded.
What changes would you like to see happen within the dance industry in Australia?
Indigenous artists leading the Australian dance scene.
What dance artists do you admire?
Vicki Van Hout, she’s an independent who has forged her own way through the Australian dance industry.
Fave dance memory?
Dancing in my last end of year show with NAISDA Dance College. It was very emotional and special to share the stage with close friends at the end of an era in my life.
Amrita Hepi is a Sydney based dance maker. Find out more about her and her work here.
If you’re just starting out in your career, a few right moves early on can help set you up for life. For more stories in our AustralianSuper KickStart series head here, or go to AustralianSuper.
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