- Title:
- Long Sentences and Agitato
- Author:
- Arabella Frahn-Starkie
- Date:
- 27.10.25
The author (Arabella Frahn-Starkie) pays their respects to the Traditional Owners of the land on which they live and enjoy, the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. They pay their respect to Elders past and present. The author pays their respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, whose culture and knowledge has sustained and cared for Country for millennia. This piece was written very close to the banks of the Merri. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
Watching a dance performance is an excellent way to spend time. The situation is a perfect balance between bizarre and business-as-usual. To be with a group of people seeing something for the first time, to sit amidst discovery and ambiguity. This August, Dancehouse’s second season for 2025 opened with choreographic offerings from Rhiannon Newton and Jo Lloyd. I’m always excited to become privy to what an artist has to say and how they choose to say it. In Long Sentences, Rhiannon Newton performs a thought-provoking monologue that cleverly hinges on the multiple meanings of a sentence, to communicate a vital message. In Agitato, Jo Lloyd rouses Fanny Mendelssohn’s Allegro molto agitato in D minor, an obscure musical reference from 1823, in what feels like a bio-fictitious, choreographic restaging of a past encounter.
Rhiannon Newton, Long Sentences, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
Rhiannon Newton, Long Sentences
Making from the middle
Long Sentences is a 45-minute-long peaceful protest. A monologue for voice and movement, in this work Rhiannon Newton uses her deeply embodied intellect to implore the audience to recognise the interconnection between ourselves and our surroundings. Newton emerges from the back corner of the upstairs studio at Dancehouse. The lighting is low and her movement reflects its soft glow. Despite being at a distance, her voice—which will be a constant presence guiding and shaping the work to come—can be heard clearly. Delivered in a rich, mellifluous tone—steady and assured, sometimes menacing, foreboding even—the scene is set for the beginning of the work, the beginning of the sentence.
Newton moves amorphously, continuously, non-hierarchically, like her hair follicles are listening to the space around her. Her voice speaks the perspective of the sentence, as though the sentence itself is bodily and sentient. Her inside fluids the words and her skin acts “as punctuation.”1 She is always simultaneously dancing and talking, as if to her, dancing is as behavioural as breathing.
Newton outlays the word ‘sentence’ as polysemous. A sentence, with its basic structure of beginning, middle and end, becomes an allegory for past, present and future. In the alternate understanding of the word ‘sentence,’ our actions in the present are connected to a long chain of reactions played out over much longer time frames. The ecological consequences of our human presence is a sentence dealt to and paid by the Earth and all its inhabitants. These layers of meaning set up a constant inertia between what is happening in the room and the metaphor that extends beyond the walls and time of the performance.
Rhiannon Newton, Long Sentences, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
Newton grasps my attention with a slow and decisive tone – I hang on every word. One particular phrase strikes me: “Making sense, making sentences from the mess of the middle. We have to make from the middle because we never get a fresh start.”2 I feel this push beyond intellect to touch an emotion in me, something akin to grief. It starts locally. What have I said that can’t be unsaid? What have I done that can’t be undone? And then the thought moves to a more collective question. How do we move from this place, the middle, now? I think of overwhelm as the antithesis of presence. Overwhelm causing disconnect and the consequence of disconnect on a global scale.
Throughout the work, Newton is live scored by Peter Lenaerts, who progressively builds and strips the sonic space deftly with electronic music that quietly thunders and echoes. In the centre of the work, Newton spins wildly and mesmerically on a lazy Susan. As she does this, Lenaerts loops her vocals, layering and collaging her sentences together. The volume increases and this layered language develops a cacophonous and somewhat stressful image. Newton spins and spins. I imagine her as a drill. She is in the centre of the space, in the centre of the work, drilling into the centre of the earth. The distress of excavation, the embodiment of relentless energy consumption and the feeling of powerlessness to resist the momentum of our ecocidal sentence. “The feeling of being at the beginning of an ending.”3
Rhiannon Newton, Long Sentences, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
Throughout the performance there is a large rock that holds presence in the foreground of the space. It is a relic from her hometown on Dunghutti country. A section of the work involves Newton holding the rock, letting its weight bear down on her. The effort of this is laid bare to see, as its rough surface rotates and drags across her skin. She progressively carries it with her, organising her movements with and around the stone. The care and emphasis placed on this action and the magnitude of this stone within the scene reminded me of something I once read by Tyson Yunkaporta about the sentience of stone. In his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World, (2019) Yunkaporta draws attention to the immortality and memory of stone. Weathered and shaped shifted by the elements, stone is not dead matter, it is filled with energy and spirit, holding memory over deep time.4 Throughout this book Yunkaporta warns of the devastating repercussions of the thought “I am greater than you; you are lesser than me,” directed towards all things — other people, plants, animals, matter. Through Long Sentences, Newton heeds this warning, drawing attention to the body’s connection to the world beyond ourselves and the deep-time repercussions of our actions today.
Jo Lloyd, Agitato, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne. Dancers: Thomas Woodman, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Jo Lloyd. Photo: Darren Gill.
Jo Lloyd, Agitato
The pulled threads of Agitato
The lights pull up brightly as Fanny Mendelssohn’s irate Allegro molto agitato in D Minor plays aloud. Mendelssohn wrote this piece at age 18. Its immediacy gets into my spine and I sit up ram-rod straight. In this moment, I feel as though I am in communion with the past.
Jo Lloyd, Agitato, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne. Dancers: Thomas Woodman, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Jo Lloyd and Lee Serle. Photo: Darren Gill.
Early in the piece Thomas Woodman walks decisively into the centre of the space. A sequence of movements ensue that we will see again and again. Woodman swiftly whips his frame in all directions. He intricately articulates at each joint, sequencing efficiently from bone to bone and bone to muscle, like the inner workings of an analogue clock. The intensity and detail of this movement sequence is replicated across the entirety of Agitato’s movement language.
All four performers—Jo Lloyd, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Lee Serle and Thomas Woodman—weave in and out of the scene. Angular, exploding movements propel through pelvic shudders and ricochet through the spine. Weight is tossed and thrown around – heavy, boisterous, honest and earthbound. Sequences of movement are layered through repetition and canon. It is the most pleasing moving puzzle. As my eye traces quickly to recognise an evaporating pattern – I find joy in the rigidity of the structure that choreographs my gaze. Simultaneously, with the tandem precision and looseness of a dog shaking water off its back, Lloyd arranges the chaos into tightly bound structures, shared rhythms and glimmers of tender physical contact.
Jo Lloyd, Agitato, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne. Dancers: Lee Serle and Jo Lloyd. Photo: Darren Gill.
A stillness repeatedly overcomes the space as though the dancers are caught in a gale that has suddenly died down. Often inconveniently perched on the balls of their feet, their uniform stillness is a silent knowledge that is shared between them. In these moments, the space is filled with agitation – a surveillance of each other, a shared conspiracy. As if the dancers are at once deeply familiar and fundamentally sceptical of one another.
Andrew Treloar’s costume design sees the dancers dressed in demure formal blacks — pleated, wide-legged tuxedo pants and a fitted, short-sleeve knit polo. I notice a small detail in each costume—a bunch of pulled threads, hanging asymmetrically from each shirt—and begin to see stray pulled threads throughout the piece. The dancers are like the fibre of a tightly woven choreographic structure, whose bodily nature pulls and strays from form, following tangents before remerging inside the dominant pattern of the weave. The screeching of sneakers draws my strayed attention back to the bigger picture after zoning in on a hand, fleetingly whispering some beautiful and complex pathway. Duane Morrison, Lloyd’s long-time collaborator, unravels the threads of Mendelsohn’s Allegro molto agitato in D Minor Allegro, woven in the previous century. He truncates, dissolves and elongates her precise piano piece with low frequencies that pump the hearts of contemporary audiences.
Jo Lloyd, Agitato, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne. Dancers: Thomas Woodman, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Jo Lloyd. Photo: Darren Gill.
A fanaticism for movement creation and structure is palpable in this work, as Lloyd flexes a particularly formal choreographic muscle. To borrow from Quentin Sprague, “All good art possesses the quality of a whole life concentrated within.”5 Agitato feels as though Lloyd has concocted and purged, in the best sense of the words, many years of devotion to dancing, stray images and shared choreographic practice with long-term collaborators—Serle, Ritchie-Jones, Woodman, Morrison, Trealor, Michaela Coventry and Anny Mokotow—to form a loud and gutsy work that speaks for itself, both in threads and as a whole.
Long Sentences, by Rhiannon Newton, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, 31 July 2025.
Ibid.
Long Sentences, by Rhiannon Newton, Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, 31 July 2025.
Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2019), 24-42. Excerpts from this chapter can also be found in: Tyson Yunkaporta, “Friday essay: lessons from stone - Indigenous thinking and the Law,” The Conversation, 6 December 2018,
⬈Quentin Sprague, What Artists See (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2025), 9.
Long Sentences by Rhiannon Newton and Agitato by Jo Lloyd were performed at Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, 31 July—2 August 2025 and 29 July—2 August 2025 respectively, as part of Dancehouse’s second season of the year.
Arabella Frahn-Starkie’s review of these works 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. Writers for this program are chosen by Performance Review for the purpose of nurturing new voices in performance criticism.
Arabella Frahn-Starkie is a dance artist, researcher and emerging conservator. Over the past seven years her artistic practice has been preoccupied with the documentation and care of dance. Her time is mostly spent considering the preservation/continuation of embodied knowledge. As a dancer, she has worked with an array of incredible choreographers, visual artists and researchers including Rebecca Jensen, Jo Lloyd, Siobhan McKenna, Ben Hurley, Sandra Parker, David Rosetzky and Katie Lee. She is a founding member of the collaborative group Polito who perform improvised techno and dance across various venues and contexts in Melbourne.
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.