Tuesday 13 August 2026

Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday)

Australian Dance Theatre presents Two Blood at Carriageworks

Two Blood is a fierce dance work from Australian Dance Theatre that explores what it means to live in Australia, focusing on that experience from a migrant perspective. It’s a work that pulls no punches with its bravery and ferocity with an intensity at times that made it excruciating to watch.

As writer and co-director S. Shakthidharan explains in the interview below, the idea sprang from the discovery of two bodies in a dry river bed unearthed many years after their deaths. The male was Cantonese and the woman Tagalaka and they were locked in an eternal embrace. They lived back in the 1890’s during the gold rush in or around the North Queensland town of Croydon.

The back story was whispered in the opening few minutes, to a darkened stage with a large circle of petals(?) delineating the performance space for a slow solo movement. But that quickly morphed into something entirely different. What we saw on stage was aggressive body movements, often violent. The opening pas de deux from Zoe Wozniak and Yilin Kong was a juxtaposition of self harm, aggression and uncertain embrace, accompanied by harsh guttural moans and screams that challenged our idea of what is a contemporary dance aesthetic. The rest of the troupe were silhouettes and shapes in the background that over time entered the fray in a free-for-all battle. The ring of flowers was quickly destroyed and scattered, a metaphor perhaps of the destruction of indigenous tradition, the circle of life arrested and destroyed.

One by one the dancers assumed the central position for their individual stories. Each spoke in their own language. As I only understand one of them, I had to read the program notes to learn they included English, Kaurna, Tagalaka, Tagalog, Hokkien and Yuwaalaraay. The ensemble choreography (Daniel Riley and Jasmin Sheppard) portrayed that it wasn’t always smooth sailing for these disparate cohorts. We witnessed altercations, mistrust, collaborations and tender embraces.

Two mobile video screens were moved around the stage by the dancers and projected a variety of images from the musicians performing the amazing score as well as country landscapes and starry nighttime skies. The music score (James Howard and Andy Qilon Chia) was constantly changing and evolving. From hard technical beats to evocative sound atmospheres with Asian and First Nations elements throughout. A standout and very moving moment was when Yuwaalaraay and Gamilaraay dancer, Joshua Doctor sang in language.

Australian Dance Theatre pride themselves on challenging the traditional concepts of contemporary dance, and the landing page of their website brands them with the caption, “Ugly Dance”. And it is ugly, in the way life can be ugly, sometimes beautifully ugly – Two Blood takes that mantra to a new level. It is not a work for the faint-hearted, but a slap in the face to dance tradition. I for one like and even need to have my preconceptions challenged, but I have to admit my limits were tested. And that is part of their success in that the work makes you think and re-evaluate, and hopefully (as I eventually did) accept and embrace the gauntlet that ADT loves to throw down.

This is the start of a mini tour for Two Blood. After the Carriageworks season the show travels to Wyong and Melbourne. You can find more details and tickets here:¹

You can also listen to a recent interview with writer and co-director S. Shakthidharan below: