Sydney Dance Company’s INDance season returns this autumn, showcasing the independent choreographic voices shaping contemporary dance today.
INDance sets the stage for four full-length works presenting bold, provocative and cutting-edge perspectives. More affordable ticket pricing opens the season to wider audiences, encouraging greater access to the physicality, creativity and innovation of independent dance.
This year’s program features celebrated choreographers – Emma Harrison, Jenni Large, Christopher Gurusamy and Oli Mathiesen – each showing critically acclaimed work that reflects the breadth of independent dance practice. The season is curated by a panel of industry advisors, led by Sydney Dance Company’s Artistic Director, Rafael Bonachela.
“INDance continues to showcase some of the most compelling independent voices in Australian dance,” says Sydney Dance Company’s Artistic Director, Rafael Bonachela. “This season’s choreographers are pushing the boundaries of performance, exploring new movement languages through their work that challenges both themselves and audiences. The four works we have selected offer a potent encounter with the ideas, identities and the creative forces shaping contemporary dance today.”
Drawing inspiration from V8 racing, rave culture, love, desire and feminine resilience, INDance brings together strikingly different choreographic worlds to surprise, entertain and challenge audiences.
Emma Harrison – High Octane
Choreographer, director and performer Emma Harrison brings her multi disciplinary practice to INDance with High Octane. Leaning into her regional upbringing and the high-adrenaline culture of V8 racing, the work is a visceral exploration of ambition, success, class and hyper-masculinity.
Blending humour, rigorous physicality, music and early-2000s inspired visuals with a powerhouse trio of performers, High Octane interrogates the price of success and the forces that shape our identities. A raw, electrifying and supercharged performance that prompts audiences to reconsider power, competition and desire.
Jenni Large – Wet Hard Long
Choreographer and independent artist Jenni Large presents Wet Hard Long, an extended and epic version of her 2022 Keir Choreographic Award winning work. Drawing on 15 years of Australian and international experience, Large’s work mixes cinematic aesthetics and flamboyance to examine patriarchal systems and celebrate feminine resilience.
Two dancers navigate exacting feats atop eight-inch heels, contending with obstacles and objects in a slippery endurance piece that dares performers and audiences. Wet Hard Long subverts narratives around sex, power, identity, and consent, delivering a provocative, jaw-clenching meditation on the demands and triumphs of the femme body.
Christopher Gurusamy – 5 Arrows
Internationally acclaimed Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer, Christopher Gurusamy performs 5 Arrows, a striking fusion of classical South Indian dance and his biracial queer perspective. Referencing the iconic Carnatic composition Mohamana, Gurusamy reinterprets its structure, oscillating between lyrical Bharatanatyam and abstract embodied gestures.
The work explores love, lust, and longing while critically reimagining how South Asian forms can be recontextualised in Australia. Premiered to sold-out audiences in 2025, 5 Arrows celebrates Gurusamy’s lived history; a performance that bridges classical technique with contemporary expression and is both deeply personal and universally resonant.
Oli Mathiesen – The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave
Aotearoa choreographer and dancer Oli Mathiesen presents the award winning work The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave, an electrifying endurance-based work exploring rave culture, techno music and the limits of the human body. Mathiesen condenses a three-day rave into a relentless one-hour performance, where dancers move continuously to Suburban Knight’s booming Nocturbulous Behaviour album.
Informed by their Indigenous, political, queer and gendered identity, Mathiesen recasts the nightclub as high art, blending chaos, physical rigour and cathartic spectacle. The result is a thrilling, immersive exploration of desire, obsession and the physical, showcasing the human body as both an instrument and witness to passion and relentless ambition.
Now in its fifth year, INDance offers independent choreographers the opportunity to bring their work back to the stage and reach new audiences. The program provides time, space and production support to revisit and develop existing pieces that might otherwise have only a brief life. Through INDance, Sydney Dance Company opens its doors to independent artists and the work shaping Sydney’s contemporary dance landscape.
INDance is made possible through the generous support of the Neilson Foundation, whose investment enables these works to reach new audiences, extend their life beyond creation, and contribute meaningfully to independent dance sector.
“Independent dance is where some of the most honest and fearless work happens – and it’s often the work that doesn’t get the platform it deserves. It’s been a joy watching INDance grow over the last five years and seeing artists of this calibre bring their full selves to the stage. We’re genuinely excited for what this year’s program brings,” says Neilson Foundation Trustee, Paris Neilson.
INDance will be presented at the Neilson Studio – Sydney Dance Company. Week One (30 April – 2 May) will feature High Octane by Emma Harrison & Wet Hard Long by Jenni Large. Week Two (7 – 9 May) will feature 5 Arrows by Christopher Gurusamy & The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave by Oli Mathiesen. For more information, visit: www.sydneydancecompany.com for details.
Images: High Octane (supplied) | High Octane – photo by Nat Cartney | Wet Hard Long (supplied) | Christopher Gurusamy (supplied) | The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave (supplied)