MONOLITH

MONOLITH is a significant new dance work by Joel Bray for 5 powerful women dancers. Floating on a dystopian island, colonised bodies become sites of silent protest, crafting a sinewy, muscular androgynous choreographic language as the dancers writhe and wrestle themselves around the space and over each other. These fierce, Brown Women move silently, yet not passively, to the alternatingly delicate and driving beats of celebrated composer Matthias Schack-Arnott. Our Elders sat on Freedom Ride buses and in Tent Embassies. Stately they sat, and endured the indignities of rotten fruit and the brutalities of arrest. And so these women present themselves as an obstacle, a defiance to the Colonising power: “Move me! I dare you!”. Their collectivity evokes a monolith. An honouring of the enormous Ancient rock formations that “sit-in” the landscape and defy the colonisation.