PIECES 2024 Artist Announcement

Presented with Lucy Guerin Inc, PIECES 2024 will spotlight innovative contemporary performances by these exceptional artists at the forefront of dance in Narrm.

Joel, Tra Mi, and Alisdair will premiere new works each with a distinct and powerful voice in an eclectic triple bill that embodies risk, boldness and experimentation.

PIECES 2024 takes place from 28–30 November at the Union Theatre in the Arts & Culture Building. The season is an invitation to come together and celebrate the electrifying vitality of contemporary dance.

Tickets will go on sale in October.

A Naarm-based performer and maker, Joel Bray is a proud Wiradjuri man and Artistic Director of Joel Bray Dance. Joel danced in Europe with Kolben Dance, FRESCO Dance Company, Roy Assaf and Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor, and in Australia with Chunky Move.

Joel’s dance-theatre encounters in unorthodox spaces spring from his Wiradjuri heritage, and use humour to engage audiences in rituals about sex, history, trauma and healing. His experimental work challenges white audience expectations of Aboriginal performance and blur the colonial genres.

His works Biladurang (2017), Dharawungara (Chunky Move, 2018), Daddy (Yirramboi Festival 2019), Considerable Sexual License (Yirramboi 2021), I Liked It, BUT (2021), Garabari (Artshouse 2022) and Homo Pentecostus (Malthouse 2024) have toured to the Brisbane, Sydney, Darwin, Midsumma, Auckland, LiveWorks, World Pride and Dance Massive Festivals, and to PICA, the Arts Centre Melbourne and Canberra Theatre Centre. Joel’s seven-channel video installation called Giraru Galing Ganhagirri (The Wind Will Bring the Rain) was presented at the National Gallery of Australia, and Storage Unit (2023) was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Joel was the 2019 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow, a 2020 Sydney Dance Company New Breed choreographer and the 2021-22 Chunky Move Choreographer-in-Residence, and a member of the Melbourne Fringe Board.

Tra Mi Dinh is an award-winning choreographer and dancer working across Naarm/Melbourne and Gadigal/Sydney. Her choreographic work is built upon an unrelenting fascination with time; harnessing the dancing body to magnify and disrupt linearity and expectation. Tra Mi is invested in movement that is virtuosic, precise, absurd, embodied, surprising, energetic, and rhythmic.

In 2022, Tra Mi won the Keir Choreographic Award, for her duet The . Other choreographic works include HOLDING (2021), The (Commission for the Keir Choreographic Award, 2022), And, again (2022), (UP)HOLDING (2023), Not the Piece (2023), Somewhere between ten and fourteen (Commission by Sydney Dance Company, 2023). Her choreographic practice has been supported through residencies with Bundanon, Australian Dance Theatre, Critical Path, Lucy Guerin Inc, DirtyFeet, Tasdance, Sydney Fringe, Ausdance NSW. Tra Mi is an Artist in Residence at The Substation for 2024/2025.

Tra Mi has danced for Lucy Guerin Inc in multiple major works; Make Your Own World (2019), The Clock: Timepiece (2019), Pendulum (2021/22/23), Flux Job (2021), and NEWRETRO (2023). Recently she stepped into Guerin’s iconic duet work Split (2017) performing at Seoul International Dance Festival (2023). In 2023 she joined the cast of Stephanie Lake’s Manifesto (2021), performing in recent shows in Melbourne, Auckland, Madrid, and Châlons-en-Champagne. Tra Mi has danced for many celebrated artists and companies including Chunky Move, Joel Bray Dance, Michelle Heaven, Victoria Chiu, Dance Makers Collective and more.

Tra Mi graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance) from Victorian College of the Arts in 2014.

Alisdair Macindoe is an independent multidisciplinary choreographer living on unceded stolen Woi Wurrung country (Melbourne, Australia). With an interest in extending the boundaries of choreographic practice, Alisdair’s work spans dance, sound, electronics, coding and text. Recent works have seen him explore automated dance and Artificial Intelligence; new technology for music expression; trans-humanism; waste and climate change; and identity in the age of narcissism.

Alisdair’s independent and collaborative work has been commissioned and presented widely, including DULL BOY (2024, Part of Three, Australasian Dance Collective, Ohm Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse); FORGERY (2021, Australasian Dance Collective & Brisbane Festival); PROGRESS REPORT (2023 & 2021, with co-director Alison Currie for Vitalstatistix & Frame Biennial @ The Substation ); SYSTEM ERROR (2021, co-created with Chamber Made & Tamara Saulwick for Arts House); REFERENCE MATERIAL (2021, Darebin Speakeasy); NONCOMPETE (2018, The Substation); MEETING (2015, with co-creator Antony Hamilton, commissioned by Arts House, presented across 35 international seasons) and BROMANCE (2010, Next Wave, Arts House & Performance Space).

Alisdair has received six Greenroom awards; an Australian Helpmann Award and a New York Performing Arts Award ‘Bessie’. He was the 2019 Resident Director for Lucy Guerin Inc; the 2019 Ausdance Peggy Van Praagh Fellow; the 2020 Dancenorth NO-SHOW resident; a 2020-21 Sidney Myer Foundation Creative Fellow and a recipient of the 2022 Chloe Munro Mid-Career Fellowship. He is a current board member of Ausdance Victoria