Title:
Brigid and Natural Basic
Author:
Anador Walsh
Date:
08.12.25

Rebecca Jensen, Natural Basic, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Darren Gill.

I’ve been on a bit of a self-imposed hiatus. By which I mean I haven’t been writing. End of year burnout has got me feeling Pirates of the Caribbean-level rusty. If you don’t get that analogy—they’re pirates, saltwater makes shit rusty—maybe that’s proof in the pudding that I’m a bit out of practice. But they say writing’s like riding a bike or fucking—once you know how—so here goes. On 19 November, as part of Dancehouse’s fourth season of 2025, I saw two works in the same evening, Brigid (2025) by Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin and Natural Basic (2025) by Rebecca Jensen. Though conceptually disparate, watching them in concert revealed some unexpected overlaps and painted an emotionally compelling portrait of our grief-stricken and sick world. The pairing of these two works, both for three dancers and choreographed by Heyward (with Ó Manacháin) and Jensen—who have emerged from the Naarm Melbourne contemporary dance scene, but pursued different paths, Jensen practicing predominantly here and Heyward working largely internationally—also presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the similarities and points of departure between these contemporaries. Peers who are carving out space for themselves as a new generation of local choreographer.

Natural Basic

Rebecca Jensen, Natural Basic, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Darren Gill.

Caught as we are amidst poly crises, the analogy that we’re all ‘hurtling towards death,’ is perhaps the best way of entering Rebecca Jensen’s Natural Basic, performed by Jensen, Anika de Ruyter and Lana Šprajcer. In Dancehouse’s downstairs theatre, before an audience seated in the round and immersed in darkness and smoke, Jensen, de Ruyter and Šprajcer danced on a black, circular, spinning platform—that at first appeared manually operated, but later revealed itself to be mechanised. Think a carousel without the frills or a spaceship in a low budget sci-fi film. The dancers mounted this platform dressed in a uniform of jeans and a t-shirt, their hair and clothing slicked against their bodies, as if they’d just emerged from the primordial ooze. At first, their breathing appeared laboured, like the air was laced with something toxic. They surveyed their surrounds, wide-eyed—hatchlings encountering this world anew. Dinosaur babies came to mind.1 Then, to a sparse, sci-fi-tinged and metronomic soundtrack, they began dancing an unpartnered waltz, in an open formation, as the platform beneath them spun.

Rebecca Jensen, Natural Basic, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Darren Gill.

The waltz, in Natural Basic’s case a Viennese waltz, is a traditional ballroom or folk dance of German origin. It involves a series of movements—a step, slide, step—performed in a clockwise turn, repetitively to music in ¾ or triple time. In this work, the waltz is employed as a vehicle through which Jensen explores the human body’s capacity for responding to its surrounds and external stimuli. Dancing the same sequence time and time again, the speed at which the platform beneath the dancers revolved, dictated their capacity to stay in step. There were moments of falter, but by and large they performed in sync and I found myself in awe of their inertia, the core strength it must have taken them to perform at such a velocity without flying off into a wall. Beyond the technical skill involved, it was an impressive spectacle to behold and I’ve been thinking of it as ‘the razzle dazzle at the end of the world.’ It felt a bit cabaret—the oscillating ‘chorus girls’ and the potential for risk involved, creating a titillating effective—and brought to mind smoky backroom performances of a bygone-era.

Rebecca Jensen, Natural Basic, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Darren Gill.

When it first emerged in the 16th century, the waltz caused a great deal of controversy due to the physical closeness it necessitated between partners. In Natural Basic, this manifested unexpectedly, after the initial waltz, through a series of feats of strength, partner holds and acrobatics, made all the more impressive by the continued spinning beneath the dancer’s feet. As the platform picked up speed, it appeared to tilt on its axis and the dancers’ movements were seemingly completed by gravity—the extension of limbs and falling of feet, locked into place by force. They took it in turn, breaking away from one another to retrieve props from hidden compartments beneath the stage—a cap, a cigarette and lighter, an ashtray, lip balm and harmonica. De Ruyter smoked the cigarette from the periphery, watching as mouth-to-mouth Jensen and Šprajcer exchanged carbon monoxide, a contemporary Marina and Ulay.2 Before joining the others, cigarette firmly clamped between their lips, in entangling their bodies in a series of mesmeric positions. As they performed, the props were discarded, accumulating as refuse on the platform. A moment of rupture followed— Šprajcer on top of Jensen’s shoulders and De Ruyter behind, they exited the theatre through a side door, re-emerging in nude leotards and running shoes as mules, with green foliage stuffed into their mouths—and the work ended with the dancers, shrouded in smoke, again performing the open waltz. They finished, cast as dinosaurs again, albeit more worldly ones—the temporality having shifted from the dawn of time, into a closer present and back again.

Rebecca Jensen, Natural Basic, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Darren Gill.

My geographic fixity and my ongoing professional relationship with Jensen, empowers me with a level of insight into her practice that I admittedly don’t have with Heyward’s. For example, in Natural Basic I see the evolution of a clear and commanding choreographic language that Jensen has been developing over the course of a series of recent works. This language speculates on what it means to embody the climate crisis and is defined by a recurrent series of movement phrases that appear across these works. These phrases are underscored by a high level of physical control and a technical ability that allows for the support of other bodies in impressive collective gestures—star formations, daisy chains and jive holds—that I’ve been thinking of as moments of temporary union. These movements are arresting and manifest in varied capacities across Mudddy (2024), I just get so mud sometimes (2024) and Mudddy 2.0 (2025). The only real point of departure between Natural Basic and its precursors is that this work forgoes dialogue, where the others were overtly narrative driven.

Jensen’s choreographic practice sits legibly within the lexicon of Naarm Melbourne’s contemporary dance scene, from which Jensen has emerged. I see mapped across this work glimmers of Jensen’s collaboration with Sarah Aiken (dance as climate activism) and her ongoing performance in the works of Jo Lloyd (presence and posture (the holding of one’s body)) and Lucy Guerin (theatricality and attention (how to elicit it)). The bleed between choreographers and dancers—charted by Brooke Stamp in her PhD Thesis For the Record: Perspectives on Dance Agency in the Visual Arts—is here quite apparent. However, don’t get it twisted, what I’m trying to get at here is that Jensen is coming into her own as a choreographer; emerging like the dancers in Natural Basic, from the ooze of Naarm-dance. The fact that even without dialogue, it is clear the dancers in Natural Basic are grappling with a toxic world, spiralling out of control, is testament to this. Jensen’s structured interplay between movement and gravity communicates this with clarity and is evidence of the strong choreographic logic she’s developed for herself; pulling from her experience to find footing in something new.

The same can be said for the dramaturgical elements of Natural Basic. It feels discernibly Naarm-dance, in that it gives its audience a lot and isn’t afraid to oscillate between the very subtle and the spectacular—traits I’ve come to associate with performance in this city—however in doing so, it also feels very Jensen. The costuming—functional leisurewear meets bog/rave core—and the dramaturgical decisions—the props and their accumulation, the smoke machine and Andrew Wilson’s sparse, yet impactful score—are all synonymous with the practice I’ve observed Jensen cultivating over the last few years. In Natural Basic, the confidence in the choreography, in moments of vigour and slowness alike and the structure, three acts that traverse humour/absurdity and deadpan seriousness—reaching a climax only to extinguish it—reveal this clear choreographic logic at work. One that is grounded in a firm grasp of the spectacular. In Natural Basic, Jensen reveals herself as choreographer with an axe to grind. One who knows exactly how to wield said axe (spectacle) to fell (engage) her tree (the audience).

Rebecca Jensen, Natural Basic, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Darren Gill.

Brigid

Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin, Brigid, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Predrag Čančar.

As I said before, I don’t have the same acuity to Heyward or Ó Manacháin’s practices, however I am aware of their international work dancing with choreographers like Adam Linder, Xavier Le Roy and Maria Hassabi. I have seen a handful of Heyward's previous choreographic works live—albeit over a protracted period—and so, for the sake of comparison, focus on this. From what I've seen, my understanding of Heyward’s practice is that it is grounded in what Bojana Cvejić—in Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance (2014)—referred to as ‘conceptual dance.’ It is relatively stripped back, though technically strong and concerns itself with using the body to articulate broader critical concerns.3 It also seems to draw its power from collaboration. I have seen Heyward collaborate with (artist) Jacqui Shelton and (dancer) Megan Payne twice previously on Mattering for Crush (2019) and Cry Carpet (2021). Coming into Brigid, a work developed with Ó Manacháin and Leah Marojević, my mind first went to the wailing in Cry Carpet—a work positioning crying as a ritual—which I admittedly wasn’t a huge fan of. I recall feeling that there was a critical lens missing. Sure, grief is universal, but three white folks, one displaced via a screen (Heyward) and performing from Europe, and two live, throwing themselves against the ground and sobbing on Aboriginal land, at a time so close in proximity to the Black Lives Matter movement, felt more white women’s tears than emotionally evocative.

I mention this, only to create a point of contrast. In Brigid, Hewyard’s critical development as a choreographer resounds by finding the right frame, in this case Irish folklore, by which to grapple with her Irish heritage and settler positionality here in Australia and by extension the overlapping subjugation suffered in these places as part of the English colonial project. She is aided in this by her choreographic collaborator Ó Manacháin, who is Irish themselves and as a dancer, is a powerful counterpart to Heyward. Brigid centres on the myth of Irish, pre-Christian goddess Brigid, said to have guarded the threshold between life and death. Brigid is linked to the origins of the Bean Sí (Banshee) and her caoineadh (keening). The banshee is a folklore figure, intimately tied to nature and cast as the harbinger of death. Her keening manifests as animal sounds—owl, fox and deer—and laments the departed. Through Brigid, Heyward and Ó Manacháin connect with a legacy of colonial dispossession and violence, that right now, in the context of ongoing global genocide, feels more poignant than ever.

Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin, Brigid, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Predrag Čančar.

Brigid was performed by Heyward, Ó Manacháin and Oonagh Slater. Entering Dancehouse’s upstairs studio, bathed in red light, the three performers were collapsed across wooden structures—a seating bank, stage and smaller tap stage—and soundtracked by a sparse tapping that recalled the beginnings of rain on a corrugated iron roof. As the audience settled into their seats—on either side of the room, like at a 50s high school dance—these performers began clawing themselves up off their perches, as if pulling themselves from a grave. Zombie-like feels like an apt way of describing this movement, as does Maria Hassabi’s PLASTIC (2015) come to mind.4 The performers moved toward one another and used their collision to support each other to their feet. After singing what I recognised as a Gaelic hymn, they fractured into different directions and the work sonically erupted.

Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin, Brigid, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Predrag Čančar.

Using body percussion—the slamming of limbs against body and feet against floor, in what I suppose you could call tap dancing, although that feels a weak descriptor—Heyward, Ó Manacháin and Slater propelled themselves forward, across the room. They alternated between moving in unison, travelling the space together and breaking off on solo tangents. There was a sequencing to their movement, but it was hard to pin down amongst a rhythmic complexity that was more legible as abandon, something wild. The performers seemed to gather strength from one another as they wielded their limbs. It felt like Sean-nós Irish dancing, a military march and raving all at once. A feeling amplified by the force with which their feet met the wooden floor and structures, as the sound produced mimicked a horse trot or gunfire and assaulted the nervous system.

Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin, Brigid, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Predrag Čančar.

At its climax, the vigour of this dancing gave the impression that the three performers were performing accompanied by a sea of spectral figures, their shadows cast across the walls by three floor lights. The feeling of being surrounded by ghosts gave me chills. This was ruptured by a moment of wailing that I felt could have been forgone, given the strength of the keening already produced by their dancing. Following this, the light shifted into cooler tones and was dappled as if through thick foliage. The performers regrouped, their extremities seemingly weighted down, their mouths lolling and their limbs dragging to produce movement. They jerked their heads, stamped their feet and created antlers at their temples with their fingers. The performance ending on the image of three grief-stricken, agitated deer, immersed in fog (smoke).

Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin, Brigid, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, photo: Predrag Čančar.

In Brigid, the porosity between dancers and choreographers, finds example in a similar way to those I highlighted in Jensen’s Natural Basic. Though dramaturgically strong, Brigid was also relatively simple. The lighting was impactful, but artfully refined and there were arguably only four key moments to the performance—tapping and crawling, complete physical abandon and a cacophony of falling feet, wailing and mourning deer. The choreography was not complex, but it was effective, designed to create strong images and it did. I saw in it a very European performance sensibility, specifically I saw mirrored in the work, the practices of Adam Linder and Maria Hassabi—Linder’s inhabiting of animal forms and Hassabi’s glacial, controlled movement—two choreographers who regularly work in a visual art context and who Heyward and Ó Manacháin have previously worked with. There was a quiet confidence and a restraint in Brigid, that draws on different legacies to Natural Basic and is more aligned with white cube conventions. Whilst Jensen’s work, it’s important to note, straddles the white cube and black box also, Natural Basic and the series of works by Jensen that preceded it, are more aligned to a theatrical context. For that reason and due to its different influences, I suggest Natural Basic offers its audience more, in the way that theatre pieces so often do.

I could go on and on, comparing these works forever, however I feel I need to stop before I hit the 3000-word mark. And so, I’ll leave you with this in closing—though they don’t tread the same conceptual terrain, both Natural Basic and Brigid use established, rhythmically entrenched dances—Sean-nós Irish dancing and the waltz—to trouble the overlapping socio-political issues of climate change and colonisation and to reflect on the current state of our world and how we have arrived here. The pairing of these works—a testament to Dancehouse’s Artistic Director Joshua Wright—charts a history of human violence, toward each other and the planet we call home and gives poignant cause for reflection on how and why it is that we persist, particularly in the privileged ‘Western’ world (and at what cost). This pairing also spotlights two emergent Naarm choreographic practices—hence my focus on Heyward and Jensen—and through them the networks of influence from which they’ve spawned. The image of three people dancing together and carrying a little of each other away with them afterwards, is one I’d like to leave you on. Maybe I’m not so rusty after all?

  1. This is probably because it’s noted in the promotional copy.

  2. I'm thinking here of Marina Abramovic and Ulay's 1977 'Breathing in, Breathing out,'

    ⬈

  3. Bojana Cvejić, Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2014).

  4. I note both Heyward and Ó Manacháin have performed with Hassabi in the past.

Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin's Brigid was performed between 19 and 22 November 2025 and Rebecca Jensen's Natural Basic was performed between 18 and 22 November 2025, as part of Dancehouse’s fourth season of the year.
Anador Walsh’s review of this work has been co-commissioned by Performance Review and Dancehouse as part of our annual writer’s program.
Performance Review has partnered with Dancehouse to commission critical writing, responding to Dancehouse’s 2025 programming. This writing has been independently commissioned and edited by Performance Review and financed by Dancehouse as a means of addressing these organisations’ mutual desire to build dance literacy in arts writing and to critically support emerging choreographic practice.

Anador Walsh is a Naarm-based curator, writer and the founding director of Performance Review.

Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.