Brisbane Powerhouse, Powerhouse Theatre
September 22, 2018

An unyielding, wedge-shaped wall cuts through the centre of the stage at Brisbane’s Powerhouse Theatre, dividing it neatly in two and obscuring areas of the space from all but the centremost members of the audience. Townsville-based contemporary dance company Dancenorth’s new work Dust is directed and choreographed by the company’s Artistic Director Kyle Page and Associate Artistic Director Amber Haines, and follows the success of Lucy Guerin’s award-winning Attractor, which the company premiered in 2017 in Melbourne before touring, including to last year’s Brisbane Festival.

Dust explores ideas of inheritance in the wake of the birth of the directors’ son Jasper last year: “What has been handed to you, what has been handed to us, and what in turn we hand on to other, our children,” Page and Haynes write in their Directors’ Note. Thanks to a deceptively minimal set by Liminal Studio, the audience is keenly aware of who has been handed what even before the lights go down at the start of the performance: those in centre seats can take in the entire vista, while those on either edge will only see half of the opening scene when the seven dancers...