What exactly can we dance about? Australian-born theatre director and choreographer Lloyd Newson has been asking this question since the early 1980s. He was driven initially by frustration with the form’s preponderance of superficiality and what he forthrightly calls “con-artistry”. “At one point I thought, ‘I need to do stuff that I find true to my life’. I was tired of going on stage executing empty movements in a leotard and doing duets pretending to be heterosexual. There were lots of issues that I observed, that I read about, that were not being addressed in dance, and I thought, ‘how can I take those real life issues and put them into the art form?’”
What he then found, and has proved time and time again with his UK company DV8…
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Dance Australia (Digital) - 1 Issue, April/May 2017