Is this the Commonwealth of Australia? Yes? This is your Landlords speaking!

Through raw physicality, humourous skits, and a power anthem soundtrack, we disrupt the silence of a 250+ year struggle. The same questions echoed through generations. SILENCE pulls the Treaty conversation out from under the rug and slams it back on the table. Because the conversation about a TREATY cannot be silenced in Australia.

Funny and irreverent and reverberating with power… If you think you know Australian contemporary dance, you haven’t seen SILENCE. With thrashing live drumming and a raw aesthetic, Thomas E.S. Kelly has combined intimate storytelling with significant moments in Australian history as SILENCE interprets an ongoing conversation for a new generation.

There’s SILENCE between the stars as the Emu travels across the night sky. There’s SILENCE in the dancer’s energy when they hit the cut, the rupture between rhythms and movement creating a vibrational glitch for the spirit world to enter. It’s also the deafening SILENCE under White noise. 

We have marched across our Country. We have had promises made and promises broken. We stand on a stage, to the beating of a live drum kit, as bodies thrash through white noise to continue the conversation. Towards action. Towards resolution. 

Jhindu Lawrie’s audacious rock drumming full of dynamism, grunge and raw power calls back to Thomas E.S. Kelly’s choreography, in brash, yet vulnerable and visceral scenes, with Kelly’s trademark charm and wit interspersed in between.