(Un)Tethered

Presented by VCA Dance and Design and Production

New Dance Works by David Prakash, Chimene Steele-Prior, Sarah Aiken and Luke George

Tethered to a reality that is in a state of accelerating precarity, we perceive the fragile beauty that surrounds us with a heightened awareness of Dance as an act of assembly and renewal. For our 2024 Graduation Season, four new contemporary dance works by Melbourne-based choreographers affirm VCA’s commitment to constantly evolving creativity, to the power of intergenerational learning, and the transformative potential of the choreographic.

VCA Dance and Design and Production students have collaborated to present new choreographies and designs expressive of the diverse drivers that our contemporary present makes known. David Prakash invites the dancers to unpack the importance of community building and interpersonal relationships, whilst tending to the collective responsibility that we hold to one another. In Chimene Steele-Prior’s work, dream-like states are evoked through pulsing fluid streams of movement that tumble and float.  VCA Alumni, Sarah Aiken makes a welcome return to VCA bringing her low-tec posthumanism in a work that offers multiple angles on the mythic and the real. And finally, Luke George (also a VCA Alumni) creates a dialogue between bodies and ropes building tensegrity structures of intimate entanglement.

We invite you to join us in celebrating the achievements of our graduating year students and to recognise in these dances and designs the power of the arts to sustain relationships with that which tethers our lives to meaningful and breathable futures.

- Carol Brown, Head of Dance

CONTENT WARNINGS: This performance includes loud noise and haze effects.

Videos On Demand

DISRUPTOR

Humbled by the lineage of all who came before, in this work we pay respect to street dance as a gift allowing us means for self-expression, community, play and protest.

Watch 'DISRUPTOR'

DRIFT

“They come to be woken up.” Christopher Nolan, Inception.

Watch 'DRIFT'

Sum of it

Bodies lose their edges, overlap, coexist, slip between forms and temporalities. Working across movement, materials, video and light, this assembled choreography is  an ecology of parts, versions, assembled & reassembled - human & non-human - finding patterns of unintentional coordination, multiform, multi-temporal collaboration.

Watch 'Sum of it'

Time Under Tension

Used for many different purposes in all cultures around the world, rope is a dynamic material that lends itself to explorations in complex human relationships.

Watch 'Time Under Tension'

Program Notes & Complete Credits