Past Projects

the smiling ceremonial quality of the rebellion is so disarming and so cleverly worked in with our own understandings of theatre etiquette that the audience victims are left laughing rather than humiliated.
– Carl Nilsson-Polias, RealTime

Sweat is a darkly humorous performance which takes its audience into the world of those who do the dirty work.

Combining popular movement forms to create a unique audience experience, dance, parkour, Bboying, acrobatics, martial arts and football merge in a choreographic score that shifts through and around the audience. Performing live, Japanese “Noisician” Hirofumi Uchino drives the action with a taut and dynamic electronic noise-scape.

Sweat explores the power dynamics between those who serve and those who are served. It focuses on workers within the service industry and the intimate role they play in our lives whilst remaining totally anonymous, raising questions of power, class and race within our contemporary society.

Branch nebula’s sweat wittily and forcefully disorients our sense of what it means to be an audience.
– Keith Gallasch, RealTime

Teens will love it for its raw energy and urban culture while established theatre audiences will be enthralled by its sophisticated interpretive physical theatre […] See it for the immediacy of performance and for the charged climax to its elusive narrative. Unspoken, yet starkly dreamt, Paradise City is a brilliant powerhouse of physical poetics. Don’t be afraid to sit in the front row.
– Independent Weekly, Adelaide, 24 April 2008

In a truly spectacular hybrid of urban street-style meets dance, a skater, a break-dancer, a BMX rider, an acrobat, a dancer and a singer converge at a meeting in a stark urban space. This no-place, non-space is strewn with orange & white road barriers; a plush red velvet curtain cascades incongruously into it, a leftover from some former glory.

The skateboarder prepares the space, his wheels tracing cursive arcs across the surface. Watching him is a woman dancing; her inner thoughts of an alienating city eerily sung & growled by a fallen opera diva. Entering & changing the rhythm with convulsive body pulsations is a break-dancer, made anonymous by a faceless hood.

Weaving through the road barriers, a BMX rider dances from pedal to peg and up on one wheel, his bike spinning around his body. The diva voices the bodies to a live score spanning Bach, filmic soundscapes and driving beats, as the performers begin to interact, to mimic and borrow and steal – and to shape the urban world they inhabit.

Confrontation develops into an anarchic, whirling chase around the performing space that is no doubt as tightly choreographed as it appears to be raw and wild.
– Jill Sykes, The Sydney Morning Herald,October 2-3, 2004

Human traffic negotiates super bright lights, shiny surfaces and booming noise. In the shopping plaza, bodies clash in shifting scenarios within a theatre of everyday reality.

Plaza Real is a physical theatre work investigating diversity, ethnicity and cultural resistance within the heart of a corporate-owned public space. The absence of a community-controlled village square leaves the shopping plaza as the last social space – the ultimate urban entertainment destination. It is here that an emerging ethnic intermixture fiercely competes for self-representation.

The performers have a vitality that is intensely raw and physical. Idiosyncratic movement intersects with do-or-die recklessness.

Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters play out an extraordinary finale of equine lust, taking to the air on ropes in Sentimental Reason. Rarely have I witnessed such amazed concentration at a first night dance performance – once a few people got over the giggles. It is a bold and skilful piece.
– Jill Sykes, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sept. 25, 2002

In the summer of ’99 a newspaper article described a man who stole a horse from its field, bound its legs, stripped off his clothes and had sex with it in broad daylight. He was caught in the act by two passing police as he was clearly in view from an adjoining road. The police did not know what to charge him with.

Three figures are wound up and set to run amok with a desperation that suggests time is running out: a man with a fur fetish; a woman wearing shiny new red clogs; and a pink grandma grinding out electro.

All that is nasty, pretty and dreamy in the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood is distilled to create a skew-whiff fantasy. Mad Red is a personal view on socialization realized with a maximum of physical and emotional vigour.
The characters appear to be led by an unseen hand and take on automaton qualities. They are adrenalized by thumping drum beats and bass lines which drive them to acts of self destruction executed with prescision and acrobatic agility.

Mixing and cutting dance, acrobatics and theatre with live sound defines Mad Red’s raw and instinctive style. This work is a compulsive reaction to urbanity, a foreboding of what is to come.