Independent of my shoes’ preference for abandon, for me, Prue Lang’s “Yoni” resonated. Performed by Mikaela Carr, Lauren Langlois, Amber McCartney and Tara Jade Samaya, this self-described game was one I wanted to participate in. Indeed, both nights of the KCA semi-finals embodied the collegial spirit that has always drawn me to dance, contemporary and classical. From 80 applications, eight were drawn, and all presented something to chew on or gnaw at, or perhaps even bring up. This is, of course, entirely how it should be. The cup, the prize, it is well worth striving for, with the prize being the chance to present a 20-minute work to the judges (of the award) and the audience. There is, of course, a winner of the KCA, to be announced at the finals presented at Carriageworks, Sydney, but I attended for the experience of seeing Hildegard von Bingen—the visionary, the pioneer, whose devotional songs, illuminated manuscripts, and writings on biology, botany, medicine, theology, and the arts—revealed in the vision-like assured movements of Samaya and McCartney. As McCartney passed her extended arm through the ring Samaya made with her hands, the single window within the stone walls of the monastery was drawn: a window to the outside world; a window to a higher plane. Within the focussed, uncluttered offerings of Hildegard von Bingen came a reminder to keep it tight. You cannot put all of your ideas in the one drawing, painting, or performance. The Canticles of Ecstasy, an elegant, early variation of the principle of Keep-it-Simple-Stupid. “Yoni” was an A to Z of strong female voices, from Pina Bausch and Louise Bourgeois by way of Sylvie Guillem, and in the Os, Georgia O’Keefe and Michelle Obama. A rapid-fire of questions and answers: Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper; Nobel Prize in Physics (1903) and Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1911) recipient Marie Curie conducted pioneering research on radioactivity; Statistician Florence Nightingale founded modern nursing. The bell rang. Positions changed. And a circle became Barbara Hepworth piercing a stone, echoing her statement and practice that she rarely drew what she saw, but rather, drew what she felt in her body.[note]"I rarely draw what I see—I draw what I feel in my body. Sculpture is a three-dimensional projection of primitive feeling: touch, texture, size and scale, hardness and warmth, evocation and compulsion to move, live, and love. Landscape is strong—it has bones and flesh and skin and hair. It has age and history and a principle behind its evolution." Extracts from Barbara Hepworth: drawings from a sculptor's landscape (London: 1966) http://barbarahepworth.org.uk/by-barbara-hepworth/quotations-from-barbara-hepwor.html accessed March 7, 2018.[/note]

From Program Two, the following night, Lilian Steiner’s “Memoirs for Rivers and the Dictator,” irrespective of how much the sound sought to push me away, and Melanie Lane’s “Personal Effigies” reeled me in closer. One must look back in order to move forward, in order to be a “timeless …. artefact in flux.”[note]Lilian Steiner, “Memoirs for Rivers and the Dictator” program notes, Dancehouse, 2018.[/note] From Steiner’s body as “an archival document, mapping multiple histories of presence, perseverance, inevitable physical dissolve and reincarnation” embedded in our cells, our selves, to Lane’s mirror held to the “slippery ecologies …. we inhabit. How do we design our shells, conjure our ghosts or distil our souls?”[note]Melanie Lane, “Personal Effigies” program notes, Dancehouse, 2018.[/note] How? With a trumpet that pierced Hepworth’s stone (and pierced my ear drums and rattled my spine in the process), and a green stage light so intense it made one read the following darkness as red. With strombidae (conch) shells with their large, curled legs for a pair of gloves, and a face painted gold beneath a mask also painted gold. How? With a mirror that enabled tricks of the eye: a form floated, weightless, a leg extended joined a leg reflected and together made a long noodle. Cells, shells, selves, Steiner and Lane flipped what was inside, revealed it to the outside, and rendered me floored. The human body was explored in all eight choreographic works, but not always in ways I had expected. In Bhenji Ra’s remixed fish-slip, “The Wetness” (Program One), and Luke George’s “Public Action” (Program Two), the audience, and their camaraderie vied for, in the former, and stole my attention, in the latter. From “spectatorship [to] audienceship …. with embodiment and empathy”[note]Luke George, ”Public Action” program notes, Dancehouse, 2018.[/note] from the seats towards the back of the theatre emerged, rolled, and swelled, Latai Taumoepeau, Timothy Harvey, Brooke Powers, Leah Landau, and George. Slowly, they cleared the mountain of seats, “moving a difficult object from one place to another” in a “social choreography” and it was to my fellow audience I looked, noting who was hesitant to move, who found it amusing, who bristled, who became unsure.

The semi-finals were rounded out, no, make that ripped, made raw by Nana Biluš Abaffy’s brutal “ChoreoGraphic”[note]Nana Biluš Abaffy’s biography, http://www.凹.world/bio.html, March 7, 2018.[/note]

marathon, “Post Reality Vision” and Amrita Hepi’s roaring (yet soundless Yamaha PeeWee 50) “A Caltex Spectrum.” I walked home, and the world looked different. I walked home, and I was unsure of my place in it. In the comparative silence of the traffic, in the dark of the night, my familiar path was no longer; who could ask for more than that?