THE ACT

The body performs. The body sells. The body shifts,  moving through intimate spaces. Good, masochistic and disciplined. Where the chasm of the sacred shrink wraps down to industry.

Amrita Hepi is a Bunjalung Ngapuhi dancer and artist, whose oeuvre has continually explored the dilemma of authenticity. Here she collaborates with Tilly Lawless, sex worker and writer, to confront the false divides between intimacy and commerce. Together in ‘The Act’, they excavate the space where professional touch meets professional movement—each a kind of construction, a knowing choreography.

Bodies become currency, become canvas, become both subject and object, become protest. The working body, the body that refuses to apologise for its labor, the exhausted body. The body that gets it, gives it, and catches us again.

Mish Grigor, a theatre director known for dismantling theatrical conventions and interrogating power, works through this dialectic: that both sex work and dance navigate the tension between self and service, between ideas of authenticity and choreography.

With design by Daniel Jenatsch and Katie Sfetkidis. The question isn’t whether we can separate the real from the performed—the question is why we insist on trying. ‘The Act’ lives in this ambiguity, this blueness, this space where desire meets commerce meets art meets flesh.

CREDITS

Co-creator and Performer: Amrita Hepi
Co-creator and Performer: Tilly Lawless
Director and Co-writer: Mish Grigor
Composer and Sound Designer: Daniel Jenatsch
Lighting Designer: Katie Sfetkidis
Lighting Associate: Harrie Hogan
Costume Designer: D&K
Produced by Performing Lines and Vitalstatistix

This project is produced by Performing Lines and Vitalstatistix and supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts investment and advisory body; by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme; APHIDS and TRANSFORM (UK), and originally developed with support from the City of Melbourne through Arts House’s CultureLAB; and Lucy Guerin Inc.

Supported by APHIDS through SUPERMASSIVE