- Title:
- Now you’re speaking m̶y̶ l/Language
- Author:
- Georgia Banks
- Date:
- 19.05.25
Shadow Text and SpringCity 43214
I was recently speaking with a friend of mine that now lives in France, originally from ‘here’ – they were telling me about their recent experiences navigating the French medical system, in search of gender affirming care –
“the language here is so binary
it makes it so people can only be binaries.”
It made me think about how much language can seep in through the pores in our skin, burrow into our bone marrow and make us into who we are from the inside out. We all use all kinds of language to communicate all day; our words, our tone, our faces, our bodies, our clothes are all languages we wield in attempts to tell people who we are. Both Chloe Chignell and Amina Szecsödy’s Shadow Text (2025) and MaggZ’s SpringCity 43214 (2025), from Dancehouse’s First Season of 2025, take a multitude of languages and inhabit them, explode them from within and use their fractured pieces to piece together their own versions of what was there before.
Chloe-Chignell and Amina Szecsödy, Shadow Text, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Rudy Carlier.
Shadow Text spreads language like butter across warm crumbling toast, like the legs of a well-known lover and consumes it, digests it, expels it. Upon entering the space I was immediately struck by my own relationship to performance and the language of navigating social spaces – we were told to sit on the blue square that inhabited the majority of the space, but because it read like a stage audience members were hesitant and stuck only to the edges. There were books titled Jokes in piles - are we allowed/supposed to take the books? I was made hyper aware of my role as viewer by these constructs and it made me feel complicit. Shadow Text, conceived, choreographed and performed by Chloe Chignell and Amina Szecsödy, is a deep exploration of Monique Wittig’s seminal lesbian text Les Guérillères, which tells the tale of a violent and erotic feminist duotopia. More than that, it is a total retooling of the language of language. Two simultaneously intimate and independent bodies move around and through the ocean of bodies watching on and around blue felt. As the performers moved their bodies, to me, they became:
Like a human centipede/Like lego pieces/Like strands of DNA/Like adjunct verbs/Like the sea and someone swimming in it/Like slugs fucking/Like two magnets attracted and repelled/ Like the two parts of a semi colon/Like a predator and its prey/Like a parent and child/Like a seat and a person sitting/Like lovers lying side by side.
Chloe-Chignell and Amina Szecsödy, Shadow Text, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Rudy Carlier.
The movement was soft and strong, rippling like broken water, refracting like light. Projected instances of text were used to swerve heads to surround and envelop, voice was used to speak, to sing, to whisper, feet were used to shake the earth and make my ribcage vibrate. In Shadow Text absolutely everything mattered
was matter
every word had something to say, including the ones that were not said.
Chloe-Chignell and Amina Szecsödy, Shadow Text, 2025, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Rudy Carlier.
In SpringCity 43214, the choreographic debut of movement-sound artist MaggZ, language was being used as a sort of code, something that could be hacked, overwritten, retooled. In this instance the language of game-play being hijacked was a means of exploring the artist’s diasporic experience, something steeped in its own relationship to navigating and straddling myriad codes of language. Where this work was most effective was in its world building; the conceit, costuming and characterisation of the performers all deeply immersed its audience into the game of SpringCity 43214. The game we were playing here was a sort of collision of Mortal Kombat and Crash Bandicoot – with the movements of performers transitioning extremely effectively between a bouncing ‘choose your fighter’ selection menu, a frenetic high speed fuck a boulder’s coming, button smash and a sort of ‘glitch’ choreography that made one feel as though they were watching the dance with a strobe light on, only catching every second beat.
MaggZ, SpringCity 43214, 2025), promotional imagery. Photo by Simon L. Wong.
When the game-play was advanced beyond the realm of an immersive narrative and into a participatory element of the work I was unfortunately somewhat jolted from my suspension of disbelief. A performer dubbed the ‘SpringCity Angel’ was moving through the crowd throughout the performance with a bowl of folded pieces of paper, selecting members of the audience to choose a word, presumably from two, but to what effect I couldn’t completely deduce. I found the structure of this participation a little difficult to follow and found myself trying to pinpoint how exactly this aspect was impacting the work I was watching; I got a little bit too math lady meme about it and let myself be slightly lifted from the fantasy SpringCity 43214 was embedding us in. Ultimately though, SpringCity 43214 was a powerful narrative piece – it isn’t easy to create and inhabit an entire alternate universe, let alone have a room full of people feel like they’ve followed you
directly
down
the rabbit hole.
MaggZ not only built a whole new world, they also built out that world to hold their own personal narrative, adopting a sophisticated web of cyber-languages to spin their own story.
MaggZ, SpringCity 43214, 2025), promotional imagery. Photo by Simon L. Wong.
Both Shadow Text and Spring City 43214 take language out for a ride, though down different roads. For one language is a blue expanse, is a rose which we’ve always known, is bodies speaking and mouths moving. And for the other, language is persistence, is entering the chat, is a squirrel fighting a flower.
In both, language is a medium and a message, is a means to and end, and an open portal for us to walk through.
I have of course, can of course, only tell you what I thought of these works in my own words, using the language I have available to me which cannot possibly suffice - how do you pin a dance down on a webpage? The moment a phrase leaves a mouth and enters an ear, or leaves a body and enters an eye it is inherently transformed, the alchemy of us. Perhaps that is what I can confidently say both of these works are about – the language of transformation.
Shadow Text by Chloe Chignell and Amina Szecsödy was performed at Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, 10-12 April 2025.
SpringCity 43214 by MaggZ was performed at Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, 11-12 April 2025.
Georgia Banks' review of these two 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.
Georgia Banks makes performance art even when you think she doesn’t. Her most interesting work won’t happen until after she's dead - she hopes it’s good but will never know. Banks has been banned from Tinder, sued by the estate of Hannah Wilke and awarded Miss Social Impact in a national beauty pageant. She would like to go viral, break a Guinness World Record and be in an actual episode of Black Mirror instead of making her own. Banks’ never had a filling nor broken a bone (although she has been crucified) and once was convinced she'd accidentally sliced away a part of her labia during a performance (she hadn’t).