INDance – Expression of Interest

INDance is a unique opportunity for the Australian independent dance sector to have works professionally presented by Sydney Dance Company in the Neilson Studio. INDance is a curated season of diverse dance works and has been created to connect exceptional, small- to medium-scale dance works with Sydney Dance Company audiences.

If you are an independent dance maker, artist, choreographer, or small organisation at any career stage with a dance work ready to go and you need a venue to present your work, then INDance might be just right for you.

This professional opportunity is open to individuals, collectives, and producer-represented choreographers. You will bring the work and its associated costumes/sets, music, and performers. Sydney Dance Company will supply the venue and associated production support, marketing, publicity, and ticketing as well as paying you a presentation fee. Up to four works will be programmed for INDance 2026, with each work having the opportunity for a short season of three-four performances.

We encourage expressions of interest from people from cultural and linguistically diverse backgrounds, First Nations artists, people living and or working in Western Sydney, regional or rural areas, and people with a disability.

EOIs for INDance 2026 are now CLOSED.

Monday 2 June 2025 | Expression of Interest for INDance 2026 opens.

Tuesday 24 June 2025 | Information Session (online) at 2pm AEDT.

Monday 7 July 2025 | Expression of Interest for INDance 2026 closes at 5pm.

Friday 1 August 2025 | Artists notified of outcome.

30 April – 9 May 2026 | INDance 2026 Season at Sydney Dance Company’s Neilson Studio.

We’re hosting an online Information Session for INDance 2026 on Tuesday 24 June 2025. Join us to learn more about the program and ask any questions you might have.

“The program is really special and the only one of its kind in the country, I was delighted to be a part of it.”
— Sarah Aiken, 2024 INDance Artist

“We were able to showcase our work to a Sydney audience and start conversations with a variety of presenters. The name “Sydney Dance Company” had weight.”
— Harrison Ritchie-Jones, 2024 INDance Artist

“Grateful to be represented by Sydney Dance Company and to present in Sydney.”
— Kristina Chan, 2024 INDance Artist

“INDance was a once in a lifetime opportunity to present work at a nationally prestigious dance company. I’m so grateful to Sydney Dance Company for their support and professionalism and exposing Cry Baby to an East Coast audience. It was a wonderful opportunity to be supported as an artist, deepen our creative practice through performance and expand our networks.”
— Kimberly Parkin, 2023 INDance Artist

“Presenting my work in a well-equipped and state-of-the-art studio in a central city location under the brand of the country’s largest contemporary dance company was one of the milestone events in my artistic career.”
— Ryuichi Fujimura, 2023 INDance Artist

“It is rare that independent choreographers get to share their work beyond the premiere season and away from their home town. It was a joy to have this experience.”
— Lillian Steiner, 2022 INDance Artist

“It was an important and incredible opportunity to perform and share my work with Sydney folk. To be able to reconnect with Sydney Audiences and to inspire the next generation of artists and thinkers to use their voices and share their stories. To be able to perform and share my art and ideas through physical storytelling is a privilege and momentous for me!”
— Natalie Allen, 2022 INDance Artist

“It was a wonderful opportunity to share this work with Sydney audiences and in particular audiences appreciative of choreographic craft. It was fantastic to be working at Sydney Dance Company alongside a dynamic and diverse dance community.”
— Prue Lang, 2022 INDance Artist

Explore our comprehensive list of frequently asked questions to learn everything you need to know about our INDance program.

If you have any other questions or need more information, please don’t hesitate to email us.

In Slip, dance and sound interconnect in a duet between dancer Rebecca Jensen and musician Aviva Endean.

Central to Slip is Foley art, a sound-effect technique used in film, where sounds on screen are recreated in post-production using unlikely objects and body movements in a practice of substitution.

[ gameboy ], a dance theatre work that fuses street styles and contemporary, drops two avatars into the game of life.

Created by Amy Zhang, and featuring two of Australia’s most sought-after dancers William ‘Billy’ Keohavong and Ko Yamada, the work questions what is the secret to winning at life.

Inspired by Japanese game shows, video games and internet culture, two avatars are put through the ringer and tested on their ability to stay in the game.

Through a series of increasingly difficult levels, [ gameboy ] challenges players to truly consider the consequences of their actions. Will they win?

Progress Report critiques and unravels our relationship to consumerism and waste, exemplifying the imperative need to transform the value of garbage.

Plunging into the psychology of the performer as they attempt to traverse an increasingly overwhelming world of industrial plastic waste, Progress Report puts our everyday decisions under the microscope to reveal contradictory, at times hilarious, and often unbearable truths.

Progress Report brings together long-time collaborators, dancemakers and multidisciplinary artists Alison Currie and Alisdair Macindoe, and their mutual interest in the place of objects and subjects in performance. Progress Report mirrors a dynamic state of change where objects, performer, text and choreography are in flux. Upcycled objects become friends, strangers, clothing, scientific specimens, and stunning yet unruly and daunting landscapes, that reduce back to packaging and rubbish in an instant.

Progress Report questions the forces that shape our cultural norms and ideologies. Capricious and profound, this performance compels us to confront our complicity in an era defined by wastefulness, offering a potent vision for transformation.

FM Air appears and disappears –  like a scent. The three performers move in a continuous bind, oscillating in a transparent tulle bag, highlighting their physical proximity and personal histories. As the work progresses the dancers shed the bag, becoming progressively clearer to the viewer. FM Air utilises dance to simultaneously disappear and remain permanent through the vehicle of live performance. We watch as they attempt to suspend thought through motion.

FM Air is a palimpsest of earlier works, examining behaviour of gendered roles and movements that may have belonged to ancestors or ghosts past. The dancers seek to infiltrate the collusion of mind and motion, to conjure up configurations, a limitless, continuous loop, appearing and disappearing at speed. The work questions the ephemeral, what remains when the dance is finished and what is captured by the gaze of the viewer.

Make Your Life Count is an ambitious dance work that shifts scale in a heartbeat and moves from the microscopic to the universal and back again. Choreographer and dancer Sarah Aiken encounters her own self – expanded to infinite proportions and shrunken to painful insignificance, stretched into new dimensions and flattened into mute landscapes. This powerful work of imagination is a serious attempt to grapple with the paradoxes of modern life in which the individual is swollen to grotesque importance while simultaneously reduced to ineffectual and invisible impotence. 

Make Your Life Count looks for ways to soften society’s focus on the individual – to lose oneself in the patterns of community, ecology and history. Whether monstrous and destructive or lost in the crushing scale of humanity, ecology, time and the universe, this perspective-shifting work is a chance to lose yourself and maybe find something better. 

Partners in crime raise the stakes and go all out on a dance heist. The window is short and the road is dangerous — will they make it out alive? 

In CUDDLE, two of Melbourne’s contemporary dance artists on the rise, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheff, engage in a difficult and dynamic duel filled with surreal sonic and visual surprises. 

Weaving contemporary dance with elements from martial arts, figure skating, rodeo barnyard dance and a host of more abstract inspirations, CUDDLE ebbs and flows from the joyful and absurd to the inventive and technically brilliant. 

With the audience gathered around the space as though at a wrestling match, CUDDLE is a unique and unpredictable press into a strange and wondrous intimacy. 

An enchanting duet, Brightness is an invocation to our universal ties with nature. 

Concluding choreographer Kristina Chan’s trilogy (A Faint Existence 2016; MOUNTAIN 2018), Brightness moves through ecological timelines contemplating microorganisms, decomposition, transformation and emergence. 

With striking choreography, a haunting psychedelic soundscore and nuanced conceptual design elements, Brightness draws us into a deep state of listening, into our inherent connection with nature. 

★★★★★ “Kristina Chan blows audience away…turn(s) a vast and challenging subject into a thought-provoking theatrical experience.”  – Jill Sykes, SMH (A Faint Existence) 

Traversing fractured earth. 

Escaping a surface world littered with crises, we burrow into soil and stone to seek shelter within layers of debris, tunneling and surrendering to its contradictions. 

Deepening towards the tectonic pulse of the earth, time shifts and defies what we know about living in relationship with the underground. Digging closer to the polyrhythms of the core, SUB entangles natural symphonies with industrialised extraction processes, cracking through our resistance to hope. 

A soft defiance is portrayed through the endurance of SUB’s inhabitants as they come into confluence with precious materials below the surface. 

In this place that both attracts and scares us – this wet, restless and difficult place – we engage with the terror and volatility of the living natural world. 

Western Australian choreographer Rachel Arianne Ogle wields her technical and extremely physical style to draw immense unseen forces in the bodies of four dancers. Inspired by tectonic shifts, gravitational torsion and states of emotional rupture, precipice is a dance of abandon and precarious control.  

Ogle has assembled leading performance designers to create a multi-sensory experience where choreography unfolds within an electrifying light and sound installation. Contrasting precision and strength with mounting tension and fragility, this is a bold and unique work of contemporary dance from one of Australia’s rising choreographic artists.  

‘A knockout production… Rapid high-tech triggers transport us into an expansive universe through light, sound and dance… A ticket to another dimension.” – The West Australian  

Been missing your lust for life lately? Well, you’re in luck, Rock & Roll is back baby and our hearts are aching for it. You’re invited to witness a raw and edgy interpretation of youth culture through the decades, featuring an all-female Rock & Roll triplet commanding and reinventing this space.   

Inspired by bona fide music icons like Janis Joplin, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner & Iggy Pop, Cry Baby dissects such character idiosyncrasies to produce an electric performance. Be immersed in a choreographic playground that resembles a 1970’s rock-show spectacular or your own bedroom. Head banging, hip thrusting content guaranteed.  

Don’t forget to leave your ego at the door…  

Go on and cry, cry baby  

“Seriously, if you love rock and roll, you must see this show. Even if you hate that genre of music, Cry Baby is packed with so much insight and nuance that it will make you laugh while it tugs at your entire being.” – Review by Scott-Patrick Mitchell

Fall! Falter!! Dance!!! and How Did I Get Here? 
Choreographer, Writer and Performed by Ryuichi Fujimara 

When recognition is limited and reward is small, why perform? 

This program is made of two chapters from Here Now Trilogy written, choreographed and performed solo by Ryuichi Fujimura as a double bill. 

Fall! Falter!! Dance!!!
I have often wondered about the desire to perform. What keeps bringing me back to the stage? Is it the applause from the audience? The lure of the bright spotlight? The brief and torrid moment of connection with an audience reminiscent of a one-night stand? Fall! Falter!! Dance!!! is a reflection on a contemporary dancer’s life, in which recognition is limited and the reward is small. Through this solo, self-devised performance work, I ask myself the fundamental question: ‘Why perform?’.   

How Did I Get Here?
This short work investigates how one’s perception of time changes over time and how we recognize and accept our mortality as we enter the autumn phase of life.  

Traversing fractured earth. 

Escaping a surface world littered with crises, we burrow into soil and stone to seek shelter within layers of debris, tunneling and surrendering to its contradictions. 

Deepening towards the tectonic pulse of the earth, time shifts and defies what we know about living in relationship with the underground. Digging closer to the polyrhythms of the core, SUB entangles natural symphonies with industrialised extraction processes, cracking through our resistance to hope. 

A soft defiance is portrayed through the endurance of SUB’s inhabitants as they come into confluence with precious materials below the surface. 

In this place that both attracts and scares us – this wet, restless and difficult place – we engage with the terror and volatility of the living natural world. 

The Siren calls her onlooker into her alluring arms. Is this an innocent gesture born from desire for true connection, or a cunning tactic and peacockish display of power? Honesty is slippery and situations transform before they can be fully grasped. What might appear as truth can so easily reveal itself as fiction. 

The Dance wants to seduce her audience. She wants them to fall deeply infatuated with details and her logic. The Dance will shape-shift for eternity, in an attempt to attain the power of The Siren. As new embodiments materialise, old skins dissolve into memory. 

In Siren Dance, classicism collides with contemporary visions of truth, magnetism and deception to question what seduction looks like and for how long disguise can endure. 

CASTILLO explores the taxonomy of touch and texture through the lens of choreography and neurodiversity. It is a solo created with and for award-winning performer Jana Castillo. 

The work is described and danced via Pointe Shoes, Socks & Sneakers, exploring friction and texture to generate diverse and nuanced choreographic modalities. Each choreographic investigation is framed by a film, giving the spectator further insight into the complex art of dance making and sensory embodiment. The film and live elements are interwoven to a score by renowned composer Chiara Costanza. 

Julia is a powerful and gripping solo dance theatre work by one of Australia’s leading contemporary dancers, Natalie Allen, co-created with Sally Richardson. 

On the eve of the ten-year anniversary of her iconic misogyny speech in parliament, Julia is our response to Julia Gillard’s time as Prime Minister and her legacy, to the wider culture of #MeToo, and the experience of sexism and misogyny, discrimination and violence directed towards women in Australia. 

Julia is a force for action in raising awareness, calling for change, recognising we are “all entitled to a better standard than this”, and we are all part of making it happen. 

The edge of the body has disappeared; the environment has seeped inside and come to live amongst body parts; the nervous system feels its way far beyond the skin.

Explicit Contents is an evocative new work by Sydney-based choreographer Rhiannon Newton. In a sensuous exploration of our inextricable human connection with the earth, the work follows two bodies as they are made and remade by the forces and materials of their earthly surroundings. Burning and cooling, hungering and satiating, incorporating and expelling, the body emerges as a hyper-real site of more-than-human action and exchange.

Featuring Sydney-based dancers Ivey Wawn and David Huggins and composition by Peter Lenaerts (Brussels/Sydney), Explicit Contents is a visceral journey through the body’s enmeshment with the environment. Reimagining bodies as watery vessels, techno-chemical conglomerates and thermo-dynamic machines, the work questions how we can sense ourselves as a part of—and constituted by—the ecologies of the world.