Rosalind Crisp's artistic passion is in using compositional tools to ‘forget’ movements and reveal instead how they can be forever reforming themselves when freed from set patterns and meanings. Her practice works with the constant changingness that relates to the reality of our material bodies - and that reflects, more and more starkly, the world that we are ‘undoing’. Her compositional tools invite dancers to absorb, recreate and transmit this continual changingness. She will engage the dancers of DFDC not with the psychology of what they experience, but with the corporeality of it.

As one principle to enable that vulnerability the dancers will inhabit the transitions where something is not yet one thing nor another, while drawing the audience's attention to how movement is forming, rather than to the moves thereby produced.In this practice rupture is as valid and important as flow. The work is presented in a setting of proximity where the audience can move and shift their own bodies throughout the space. Pianist and composer Frédéric Blondy will improvise live, adding his similarly visceral treatment of the piano to the dance.

ROSALIND CRISP is a choreographer and dancer based in Orbost, Australia. In 1996 she established the Omeo Dance studio in Sydney as a place for her choreographic research. The studio became the home of the experimental dance scene in Sydney for ten years. In 2003 Crisp was invited by Carolyn Carlson to become the first Associate Artist of her ‘Atelier de Paris’. The Atelier managed and toured Rosalind’s company’s works throughout France and Europe (2004-2014), and facilitated her collaboration with French, European and Australian artists.

Rosalind has created over 25 major works, numerous events and performances, internationally toured her work to hundreds of festivals and is sought after for her dance methodology. Her extensive body of work critically questions dance through a rigorous practice of live composition, in all its certainty and doubt. She situates the dancer as an art maker. Her works emerge from sustained studio practice and long-term exchange with a multi-disciplinary team of colleagues. Rosalind Crisp is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and, in recognition of her influence on a generation of Australian dancers, an Honorary Fellow to the University of Melbourne-VCA.

As much as Ioannis Mandafounis is influenced by the innovations that were made in dance improvisation in the second half of the 20th century, his artistic journey is also that of a ballet dancer. To pay tribute to this double heritage he will create a duo that contrasts classical dance technique with the development of improvisational dance and his own method of live-choreography. This is a deep dive both into dance history and into the biography of a dancer. The passion, the grit, the endurance, glamour, doubts, triumphs and injuries – it’s all fiction and it’s all true.