Rinse
Amrita Hepi with Mish Grigor
About Rinse
Co-presented with Battersea Arts Centre
The standout performance and work of the night. Her simultaneously spoken/danced narrative moves seamlessly from the “beginnings” of time, and of the world itself, to her own personal journey as a dancer finding her path as an artist.
Dance Australia on Rinse, 2020.
What is it about the beginning that remains intoxicating - our persistent lust for the first rush of a romance, scene, canon, theory, relationship, meal or country?
Created by Bundjalung and Ngapuhi dance artist Amrita Hepi and theatre-maker Mish Grigor, Rinse explores the romance of beginnings and what happens next, when the initial thrills begin to fade and inertia takes over.
Hepi’s electric performance questions whether being on the brink of extinction – a series of endings of various kinds – has intensified the seduction of the past. By recreating an entropic origin myth on stage, Rinse travels from end to ending, weaving together autobiographical elements with the grand narratives of art, feminism, dance, the void, desire, popular culture and colonial history.
An intimate yet epic solo performance based on a dynamic improvisational score, Rinse expands Hepi’s fascination with hybridity under empire and contemporary dance’s fixation with the “neutral” body.
About the artists
Amrita Hepi (Bundjulung/Ngapuhi Territories) is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer based in Naarm and Bangkok. Her interest as an artist is in the idea of archive; particularly in relation to the body and how it is organised by ancestry/people/events and environment. By coalescing fact and fiction, memoir and ethnography, the local and the singular into the performance/art work she makes.
Amrita trained at NAISDA and Alvin Ailey NYC. A critically acclaimed artist she has twice been the winner of the people choice award for the Keir Choreographic Award, was a Forbes30 under 30 for artist, and has shown and been commissioned nationally and internationally. Amrita is a Triad member of performance company APHIDS, on the board of directors and artistic associate for RISING Festival and part of the Artistic Associate group for STRUT Dance. Her commitment to collaboration and kinship are key tenets to her practice.
Mish Grigor is an artist who works in performance across a range of collaborative formats. Using autobiographical tools, humour, and fiction, she is intent on examining, wasting and/or cherishing time spent with other people. Interested in the unpredictable, Grigor frequently utilises dialogical spaces, conversational strategies, and other tools of enforced liveness.
Based in Melbourne since 2017, she is Director of APHIDS with Lara Thoms and Eugenia Lim. APHIDS functions an as umbrella under which the three artists shield themselves from the grand artist subject, in the process creating a practice that is greater than the sum of its parts. APHIDS works in various medias, from theatre to gallery contexts, text based work, and occasionally slumber parties.
Mish’s solo piece The Talk, about changing conversations around sexuality within families, has toured extensively after its premiere for Field Theory’s Site Is Set season. It sold out through the UK, touring to Forest Fringe (Edinburgh), Buzzcut (Glasgow), The Marlborough (Brighton) and Battersea Arts Centre (London).
Cast & Creatives
Co-Writer, Choreographer and Performer: Amrita Hepi
Co-Writer & Director: Mish Grigor
Sound Design and Composer: Daniel Jenatsch
Lighting Design: Matt Adey
Producer: Performing Lines
Rinse is produced by Performing Lines, and supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts investment and advisory body; the NSW Government through Create NSW; and APHIDS. It was commissioned by Performance Space and co-commissioned by the Keir Foundation, Carrigeworks and Dancehouse for the 2020 Keir Choreographic Award, and has been supported by Supercell: Festival of Contemporary Dance through the Makers Program.
