Why did you first become a dance maker? 

I feel fortunate that I had a childhood in which I was able to experience a lot of play; I was allowed to imagine worlds and dream and spend a lot of time engaging in creativity. When I think about the journey that I've been on as a dance maker, I connect it to that sense of imaginative play that I experienced as a child. In many ways, I still feel like I'm lucky to be able to sort of tap that part of my experience and just enjoy the pleasure of experimentation. Dance is a very primary form of expression, so it always feels very connected to childhood for me. In terms of career trajectory, I studied dance as a kid and as a teenager, and then worked as a dancer for contemporary dance companies throughout Australia in the early 2000s. From there, it was a pretty natural progression for me to make works. Again, to go back to that sense of experimentation and play, I always knew that I wanted to be a maker of artistic works. I knew that’s what I wanted to do before I even knew that I wanted to be a dancer. 

You are currently touring your work “4/4.” Can you tell us about the origins of the piece and what it entails? 

This piece is a bit like a signature work in that it exemplifies a choreographic practice that's been the bedrock of a lot of my creations for the past fifteen years. It's really just a technical approach to choreography, which is this number counting system that I developed to apply numbers to durations of specific movements and then string those movements together to make distinct phrases. I usually make these lists of quite random numbers, but they do tend to have a little bit of intuitive rhythmic kind of quality to them in terms of the choice of which numbers go together. They are always between one and ten; there's way more volume of ones, twos, and threes than there are sevens, eights, and nines, because the shorter duration creates a much more dynamic rhythmic punctuation kind of effect, which I'm much more interested in. 

This choreographic method has been utilized in many works that I've made, but it's rarely been the subject of the work; mostly, it’s been used to create material in a work that had some other larger thematic context or some other kind of dramaturgical anchor. Around 2015 or 2016, I did make a duet which was an exploration strictly of this choreographic method, but it was more like a demonstration to show how the method works. Like, “These are the steps and these are the complex arrangements you can come up with, etc.” With “4/4,” I sort of bounced off that. I wanted to expand the potential of the technical possibilities of the form by making two quartets, hence the title “4/4,” but I was still interested in how we perceive a duet. The work is essentially a duet of two quartets.

I think something interesting that happens in a lot of works with this more academic approach is that even if you start in a place of trying to extrapolate the choreographic potential of this very specific method, the human element will always shine through. The personality of the people involved in the creation of the work forces its way through and makes itself very present within the journey of the piece. The choreographic language is a quite restricted palette of possibility, but within that palette there’s this dramaturgical arc in which the dancers are pushing out beyond that limit and becoming a much more expressive force in the work.