Rinse is a show which explores beginnings and new starts. Did the text shape the movement, or was it the other way around?
I created Rinse in 2020 for a competition for the Keir Choreographic Award—initially as a shorter version, on which I quickly decided to expand. We have been touring with it since 2022. It’s the first performance I conceived as a choreographer, using both textual and physical dramaturgy with equal importance. I developed it alongside writer and director Mish Grigor, and we tried to be as precise as possible when it comes to the topics we explore in the show, given that some of them are actual historical events. Text and movement constantly complement each other, the body picking up where the text leaves off, the text responding to the body’s impulses. I didn’t expect to speak so much at first. But we quickly realised that it was necessary. We found a rhythm that makes body and speech inseparable, either accompanying or contradicting each other. Rinse tells the story of a new beginning, a series of starts that echo each other. The performance explores a non-linear relationship with time, based on cycles. It was about weaving connections between ideas as they emerged along the way.
This exploration of non-linear time lets you rethink the way Western cultures approach history and chronology.
I wanted to explore a relationship with time that would break away from the timeline of colonial history in Australia. I question the beginnings of the country as Western history describes them. It allowed me to reflect on the way narratives are constructed and everything that goes with it, from reality to collective imagination. There is a historical version of the discovery of the Australian territory in 1788, but there is also another narrative which tells us that Australia is the oldest living culture in the world. Does a place need to be defined as a country to exist? What then of everything that came before? In Indigenous thought, the relationship with time is seen as a series of cycles, rather than being dictated by the Western framework of Greenwich Mean Time. I asked myself how to embody this conception of time and chronology. Dance and performance, as art forms, are particularly suited to this kind of experimentation. As I delved deeper into those grand Western narratives, I encountered a dilemma. On the one hand, there was a need for authenticity, which meant returning to the origins, and on the other, a history that has evolved so much that it has become akin to fiction.
I delved into archives then. First the archive of the body and the way it moves, and then the sociocultural archives of my land. All of that through the prism of dance. My family comes from multiple Indigenous territories: from the Bundjalung Nation in New South Wales, Australia, home to nearly 800 different Aboriginal groups today. But I’m also part of the Ngāpuhi (Māori) culture of Whangārei, in Northland, New Zealand. This dual identity, to which you have to add the influence of colonial culture, isn’t very common. That’s what I tried to reflect in my choreographic research: this multiplicity of influences, both ancient cultures as well as the processes of appropriation or assimilation brought by the English diaspora and the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Does your choreographic work include all those histories?
Rinse is a blend of traditional dances, including the Māori Haka, and of the teaching of Martha Graham and postmodernism, which stem from a long lineage of Western thought and research on dance. I see dance as a way to approach language, to teach and question it. That’s why I added a Haka dance in the show. The Haka is a traditional Māori ceremonial dance, known worldwide primarily thanks to the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, but which is also performed at weddings and funerals, and any other significant event in New Zealand. It is as much a cultural as a social dance, appearing at different moments in life, reflecting both our past and our present, and evolving over time. Originally, its aim was to teach people how to hunt and fish in a natural, wild environment. It taught us to distinguish sandy soil from rocky terrain, the difference between freshwater and saltwater…
Rinse tells a deeply personal journey through the history of dance and of the land, within a scenographic and sonic landscape inhabited by words and movement.
My work often sits at the intersection of visual arts, dance, and theatre. I like to work on hybrid forms. In Rinse, there is this idea that the text allows us to move through different spaces, often providing context. We designed a minimalist space inhabited by modular elements whose shape and function shift according to the imagination. The space might begin as a reflective surface telling a story of falling in and out of love, before transforming into an archipelago of islands where I find refuge. I wanted the scenography to be easily adaptable, that would almost give the impression of expanding as the show unfolds. But I also wanted it to remain simple, because the text and movement already carry a wealth of information. Added to this is the musical work of my longtime collaborator Daniel Jenatsch, conceived as a sonic landscape of renewal and repetition.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant in January 2025.