Sydney Dance Company’s New Breed
- neighbourhoodmedia
- 23 hours ago
- 4 min read
Inside the final New Breed season from Sydney Dance Company, featuring four world premieres from Australia’s rising choreographers
By Adeline Teoh
Now in its 12th season, Sydney Dance Company’s New Breed continues to stand as one of Australia’s most vital platforms for rising choreographic talent.
Bodies as landscapes, dancers as pigeon people – there’s so much choreography can say if you understand the language of dance, and so much you can feel even if as a newcomer to the form.
For 12 years the Sydney Dance Company’s New Breed program has placed emerging Australian choreographers in the spotlight. A collaboration between Neil Balnaves AO, of principal partner The Balnaves Foundation, and Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela, New Breed has commissioned 49 new works by 47 choreographers, giving Australian dance the platform to develop new talent.
“Over 12 seasons we’ve experienced thrilling, compelling, and deeply original works that have left a lasting impact on Australian dance,” says Bonachela. “New Breed has been an anchor of Sydney Dance Company’s vision to nurture and platform the voices of emerging choreographers.”
The December 2025 presentation is the finale for the New Breed program and sees four world premieres by fresh faces Emma Fishwick, Ngaere Jenkins, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Ryan Pearson.
Fishwick’s marathon, o marathon examines the desire to continue performing personal convictions in a time of exhaustion. “I interviewed 12 people with frontline professions – this included paramedics, nurses, psychiatrists, teachers, carers, social workers, and climate activists. The focus was on what they know to be true about what they do and how it functions within society today,” she says of the genesis of the work. Key ideas of persistence, doubt, trust, and resistance emerged. “Then it sprawled out from there to find different references and aesthetics as a way of expanding how the dancers and audience might relate these ideas to present day realities.”
Though the Perth-based choreographer says she never seeks to force an understanding of her work, she invites people to relate to what unfolds on the stage. “I hope that people leave feeling more aware of their relationship to persistence and resistance, and how that impacts the way they move through the world today.”
Jenkins, a Sydney Dance Company dancer, makes her debut as a choreographer with From the horizon thereafter, an homage to her native Aotearoa/New Zealand. The hardest part of transitioning from dancer to choreographer was “having infinite possibilities and deciding which path to follow to get to the river,” she says. “I’m grateful for many wise words from friends, mentors and my colleagues in the piece. I’ve loved getting a glimpse into what it takes to craft a work from the outside, far from where I feel most at home – being inside the movement as a dancer.”
From the horizon thereafter centres Jenkins’ homeland, “drawn from memories and stories my grandparents shared about the land, our ancestry and the wairua (spirit) of the ever-shifting landscape. There’s a sense of arrival or migration, a movement through the cycle of Te Kore (the void), Te Pō (the night), into Te Ao Mārama (world of light),” she elaborates. “This work is a personal reflection, an ode to the ephemeral beauty and memory of the land, to the sense of something that can never fully be held. It grieves the spaces once tenderly walked upon, the land that breathes through us.”
The world that Ritchie-Jones creates with his work Pigeon Humongous marks a distinct change of genre, underlining the expansive possibilities of contemporary dance. The award-winning choreographer, also known as a dancer and filmmaker, presents a dystopian vision in which a global virus gives rise to a post-apocalyptic world of punk pigeon people.
“In this work, I am really enjoying exploring this new world logic and pushing into creating strange tension in the work, both physically and dramaturgically,” he says. “I’m less focused on trying to impart a particular reaction when I make work and enjoy the act of offering up themes and ideas for an audience to negotiate for themselves. I invite the audience to come into my vision and to enjoy the rigour of my obsessions.”
For Pearson, that obsession is video games. Save Point sits at the nexus of nostalgia and invention and blends dance and combat choreography. “I really wanted to have a concept that was very close to me, and I knew a lot about. I like creating works about moments of my past, usually when I was growing up,” says the Sydney Dance Company dancer, who previously choreographed for Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Dance Clan program. “Save Point is about my memories playing on my PS2 and computer. It gives me a sense of confidence to create opinions about my own life, and with that confidence, I can create things that make me happy.”
While creating the work, Pearson saw interesting similarities between the gaming screen and the dance stage. “Gaming choreography shares similar dramatic moments that you might see on a stage rather than on a battlefield. That’s what’s so fun about these games, they can blur the reality of what’s possible in the real world, escaping you into these fantasy worlds where you can control elements, wield humongous weapons and ride on the backs of dragons. With this inspired melodrama we’ve created a lovely blend of dance and gaming combat, with a little hint of kids’ play.”
Although the New Breed program has come to an end, The Balnaves Foundation will continue its partnership with the Sydney Dance Company through its Artist in Residence program, which strives to support the next step of emerging artists’ creative development. For now, the finale of New Breed promises to be a momentous presentation of Australian contemporary dance.
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