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Attractor

“Watching this work is an electric experience;it is a highly successful collaboration between Australian and international artists that is evenly balanced and rich"
Sydney Morning Herald / The Age
Attractor brings together sensational Indonesian music duo, Senyawa and two of Australia’s leading dance companies, Dancenorth and Lucy Guerin Inc to create a unique music/dance ritual.
Senyawa’s performance reinterprets the Javanese tradition of entering trance through dance and music as a powerful secular present-day form. Their sound borrows from the metal bands they listened to as teenagers – Black Sabbath, Metallica, Iron Maiden – and Indonesian ritual and folk idioms. Their music and performance is influenced by forces in nature to take the audience into a transformative state outside of organised belief systems.
As the performance unfolds, Senyawa’s unique fusion of hand-made electrified stringed instruments with opera style and heavy metal voice slowly builds to a euphoric pitch. The exceptional dancers are propelled into wild physical abandonment and ecstatic release, that transmits to the audience as a visceral empathic experience. The demarcation between dancer and non-dancer, audience and performer and the professional and the amateur dissolves as the performance transitions into a large-scale dance event.

Credits

Direction & Choreography Gideon Obarzanek and Lucy Guerin
Music Senyawa - Rully Shabara & Wukir Suryadi
Dancers Samantha Hines, Mason Kelly, Jenni Large, Ashley McLellan, Josh Mu, Felix Sampson, Georgia Rudd, and Jack Ziesing Produced by Dancenorth
Dancenorth Artistic Director Kyle Page
Dancenorth Associate Artistic Director Amber Haines
Lighting Designer Ben Bosco Shaw
Costume Designer Harriet Oxley
Rehearsal Director Amber Haines

Acknowledgements

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government's Major Festivals Initiative, managed by Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, in association with the Confederation of Australian International Arts Festivals Inc., commissioned by Arts Centre Melbourne, Brisbane Festival and WOMADelaide.

Performance History

WOMADelaide

Kaurna / Adelaide

2017

White Bird

Portland / USA

2017

Centre for the Art of Performance, UCLA

Los Angeles / USA

2017

Brisbane Festival

Meanjin / Brisbane

2017

AsiaTOPA

Naarm / Melbourne

2017

Perth Festival

Boorloo / Perth

2018

Australian Performing Arts Market

Naarm / Melbourne

2018

Commonwealth Games Australia

Yugambeh / Gold Coast

2018

Brighton Festival

Brighton / United Kingdom

2018

December Dance

Bruges / Belgium

2018

PuSH Festival

Vancouver / Canada

2019

Stanford

Stanford / USA

2019

Joyce Theatre

New York / USA

2019

Clarice Performing Arts Centre

Maryland / USA

2019

Festival Cultural de Mexico

Guadalajara / Mexico

2019

Spring Performing Arts Festival

Utrecht / Holland

2019

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