“The Chronicles,” which premiered earlier this year at Sydney Festival, “reminds us that we’re always remaking ourselves.”[2] With the stage divided horizontally in two, a grassland grew in the top half, and below, in the richness of the fertile soil, the dancers shook the elements within their individual forms. As Rachel Coulson, Tra Mi Dinh, Tyrel Dulvarie, Darci O’Rourke, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Robert Tinning, Jack Ziesing et al. spun and swayed, turned up and over like a series of red proteins responsible for transporting oxygen in the blood, though the clock read one-hour, this regenerative cycle presented as inexhaustible. With arms at shoulder height, extended away from the body, folded at the elbow, to let the forearms and hands dangle, they scuttled upon the balls of their feet. Criss-crossing one another in the dark, this landscape, to me, chronicled both the transportational systems within the body and the soil, disclosing neither system to be still. In a process of change, like compost, death begets life, and so this womb-to-tomb regeneration disclosed a world of wonder. A world which doesn’t shrink as we age, but rather which “appears richer, larger, more splendid” as colours reveal their depth, and trees become “so much more than green [but] black, yellow, red, umber.”[3] 

So, too, in earth-hued costumes by Harriet Oxley, the colour green is not merely green, it contains those same blacks, yellows, reds, and umbers. It is vibrant acidic limes and blue-based forest tones, and no two costumes—checked, ruched, loose or fitted—are the same, as befits a group of dancers as they marked a path for others in the future. The dancers formed a single central line and took turns to create a movement which the dancer immediately behind them responded to, creating a quick-moving succession of transcendent moves-of-two. With a leg raised high only to quickly snap into a fold and provide a nook for another to shelter, or lightly resting upon the curved form of another, a succession of soft, languid and snappy, charged encounters uncloaked the different sensations occurring under the skin. Though wired together in a daisy chain system, each dancer made manifest how energy courses through their body, as if giving a colour to their strength and gentleness.[4] The overall effect, hypnotic.