That’s Two, Thank You

That’s Two, Thank You is a new annual dance festival celebrating “the art of the duet”.  Featuring local, regional, national, and international artists, the festival shows how “two bodies can dance a whole world of stories”. Some are intimate, some whimsical, some philosophical. They are told in innovative choreography that fuses dance and theatre in a myriad of ways.

The festival will culminate on Saturday 5^th April with DUELS, an inaugural duet dance competition featuring short works by artists planning to submit works to the Rotterdam International Duet Choreography Competition in the Netherlands. This company is the new partner of FORM Dance Projects.

This promises to be an exciting week for dance in western Sydney. Twelve dancers working pairs to present their interpretations of six different themes in a variety of dance styles.

Unfortunately, I am unable to see all six, but was lucky enough to see Two by Two, a “double bill” including Exoticism by Sydney based choreographer Lucky Lartey and Orígenes by international Spanish choreographer Daniel Navarro Lorenzo.

In Exoticism Lartey mixes the traditional rhythms and dance from his homeland Ghana with contemporary dance practices in a piece that explores “exotification and contemporary masculinity … and the lived experience of people with diverse background”.

Vincent Garcia and Lartey begin the duet by creating controlled body shapes that slowly interconnect, merging at times, pulling slightly away at others. These slow, shadowy connections then become an integration of contemporary and African movement that suggests Lartey’s vision of what” diverse contemporary work should look like in a post-colonial landscape”.

Both performers move intuitively together, creating shapes and images that suggest the coming together of cultures and art forms in a performance that celebrates the storytelling intrinsic to all dance forms.

Daniel Navarro Lorenzo brings a range of international experience across many dance forms to Orígenes, his exploration of “humanity’s fading bond with the planet”. He performs with Madeleine Bracken “in a fictional future where the natural world has withered away”. Their planet is a sparse wasteland where they move on a carpet of autumn leaves that shift in the breeze of their footsteps. To eerie music composed by Alex Zymunt H. and Adrian Blezien Pérez, they move in a world lost hopes and fading memories in movements that draw them together yet drag them apart.

Where Exoticism hopes for humanity, Orígenes despairs of the effects of humanity. Both show the way dance can speak universally and across generations.

And that’s just two of the six duets that make up That’s Two, Thank You. Contact Riverside Theatres for program times and booking details.

Carol Wimmer

Photographer: Ange Maloney