THE GUTS TO CREATE QUESTIONS
Desert Hothouse is a bold, three-day event by GUTS Dance. Driven by consideration and curiosity, a team of 26 exceptional creatives present a triptych of full-length dance works across the Araluen precinct.
WORDS ROSIE WILD
IMAGE IVAN TRIGO MIRAS
DESERT HOTHOUSE IS not just an opportunity to witness outstanding contemporary dance. It’s a chance to eat food, explore ideas, and engage in conversation. The team have thoughtfully devised the multi-day event for people to come together, connect, and interrogate themes crucial to truth-telling and transformation.
The core team of Katina Olsen, Madeleine Krenek and Frankie Snowdon (dancers/ choreographers) along with Ping Flynn and Erica McCalman (consultants/creative producers), has nurtured this project over six years.
“We started online during COVID. We danced in our lounge rooms and in studios. We shared things we were reading. It was a beautiful slow burn, where we could focus on massaging the concepts before exploring how to bring them together with the body and choreography,” says Frankie Snowden, dancer, choreographer, and co-founder of GUTS Dance.
“That amount of time, love, and energy has been really beneficial. It’s become this beautiful celebration of a collective endeavour against all odds. At a time where it feels like everything's combusting, the themes are not frivolous. They’re really questioning some fundamental things we deal with as humans.”
The team has chosen to tackle topics of sovereignty, extraction, colonisation, complicity, empathy, history, myth-making, occupation, and defiance, explored through something we all share – the body. And a body, it turns out, is all we need to understand the language of dance.
“In this kind of simplistic way, you have a body, and I have a body. So when you witness my body, you can imagine what it might feel like, what it might do to you if you were doing it,” says Snowden.
With multiple phases of development and discovery, the team refined the process of translating the physicality of props and bodies into shared meaning and shared questions.
“We’ve looked for props that are clear and familiar to people, then tried to flip them on their head a little bit, so that there's an in, and then you're questioning, and at some point it will unfold into, like, ‘oh, okay, I see’, and then that known quantity allows you to reach the abstract place,” says Snowden.
The three full-length works – White Lies (Olsen), Public Property (Krenek), and Territory (Snowden) – are worthy of seeing individually. Tickets are available separately, but it’s well worth seeing them all.
The pieces support each other. They butt up against each other. They share conceptual and choreographic ideas, strengthened by collaborations with a select team of consultants, creatives, designers, and dramaturges.
These exceptional creative’s have employed an expert production crew to stage the works in multiple spaces across the Araluen Cultural Precinct, moving audiences outside the theatre and into spaces chosen to amplify the palpability and physicality that’s possible in the expressive medium of dance.
“We're going to get very close to people, and our bodies are very exposed, and there's a lot of vulnerability and trust between the audience and us,” says Snowden.
“We feel very excited to share these works, these things that we deeply believe in and deeply feel could shift thinking … We don't always have the right words, or words bind us to concepts we only know through language. But bodies propel us into feeling. They allow us to imagine otherwises, and that feels potent and important, and why we’re so into dance.”
Desert Hothouse is an opportunity to witness exceptional dance. It’s a chance to keep questioning, keep wondering, keep interrogating. It’s exquisitely crafted. Be sure to get along.
GUTS Dance | Desert Hothouse
WHEN FRI 31 JUL – SUN 2 AUG
AT ARALUEN CULTURAL PRECINCT
COST $20-100
INFO araluenartscentre.nt.gov.au
