Dance

Gravitas is a 30 minute duet that combines contemporary dance and acrobatics.

The duet takes place on a six by six metre air-floor mattress that is traditionally used as a gymnastics learning tool. It functions as the stage and allows the duet to be performed virtually anywhere. This serves the company’s aim of broadening contemporary dance and introducing it to new communities. The air-floor also distorts the normal relationship we have with the ground and with gravity.

Gravity is the central theme of the piece. We explore new possibilities brought up by this new ground and try to push ourselves to the limits of this exploration.

We challenge acrobatics, a physical language normally concerned with success, by showing the beauty of its failure. We also challenge contemporary dance by applying choreography to acrobatics and broadening the dance vocabulary. By challenging both forms we attempt to blur the lines between the languages of dance and acrobatics, and in doing so we also redefine the traditional separation of high art and popular culture.

The piece also questions ideas of manhood and boyhood. The two performers play recklessly with each other and with the audience. They try to regain a sense of fearlessness that is usually lost after childhood. At the same time, as men, their interactions are competitive and at times violent.

The audience sits around the stage, surrounding the performers and creating an image of a boxing arena or a kind of communal ritual. The spectators can see, hear, smell and sense the performers. They also see other spectators, mirroring their expressions of fear, joy and laughter.

Is the performer there to entertain, and at what cost? Can a real, empathic connection occur, even outside in the street? Can we dance a new kind of dance?

In Between Tiny Cities, dancers Erak Mith from Phnom Penh and Aaron Lim from Darwin, Australia use the rituals, movement styles and language of their shared hip-hop culture to reveal the dramatically different worlds that surround them and uncover the choreographic links that unite them.

Choreographed by internationally-renowned Sydney hip-hop dance artist Nick Power and accompanied by the beats and sound design of Jack Prest, the work blends the raw, wild energy of b-boy battles with skilful improvisation and choreography, offering a cross-cultural perspective on style, culture and locality.

The project is the result of a four-year dance exchange between Darwin’s D-City Rockers and Cambodia’s Tiny Toones youth programme. The two crews have travelled, trained, battled and performed together, and Between Tiny Cities is the culmination of that exchange.