Two Blood is dance at close quarters
Two Blood sees Australian Dance Theatre break new ground as part of OzAsia Festival 2025.
The irony of directing a work is that the more time you spend working on it, the further away it gets emotionally. Call it a side-effect of familiarity, or maybe something akin to the necessary emotional removal of a doctor or a surgeon. In order to make the necessary cuts of the creative process, you need to operate at a certain distance. However, every now and then, there are moments that cut too close to the bone for even the most seasoned director to ignore.
Daniel Riley is in rehearsals for Two Blood, Australian Dance Theatre’s second world premiere for 2025. Since stepping in to lead the company in 2022, he’s created six works for the company. This will be his seventh in four years. And it’s brought him to tears.
Company artist Zachary Lopez has just danced a solo where he explores his identity as a Filipino Australian. Someone who straddles two disparate identities and two disparate cultures on contested land.
“Zach is just so generous in the work … and there’s so much of him in it,” Riley says. “The way he performs in this moment is so heartbreaking and moving. He opens himself up so fully.
“It’s so real. It’s about navigating the difference between a self-determined and a pre-determined identity. Being one thing and brushing up against what society thinks you should be.”
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Riley takes a moment. He’s emotional but steely. Like his work, there’s a considered strength behind his sense of feeling that seems to drive him.
“It hits me so hard because it’s something I deal with every day,” he says. “It’s hard. And it takes a toll on you. I don’t think there are many people, regardless of their background, who wouldn’t have had to deal with that in their lifetime. That’s why this work feels so vital.”
Alongside asking big questions about identity, Two Blood is very much a work about power – who has it, how it is wielded and how the effects of that can echo generationally. Throughout Two Blood, the dancers embody everything from the violence of colonisation and industrialisation to the slipperiness of the relationships between First Nations people and settlers, and the blush of first love.
“I’m always in awe of the artistry of our dancers and how they can be so open and so powerful,” Riley says. “This ensemble just gets better and better, and it’s such a privilege to work beside and lead them every day.”
Created alongside lauded theatre-maker S. Shakthidharan and Tagalaka dancer and choreographer Jasmin Sheppard, Two Blood is, in many ways, an exploration of belonging. Of finding your place in and on country that often refuses to reckon with its past and embrace the diversity and variability of its identity.
“The starting point for the work was the image of the discovery of two bodies – a Tagalaka woman and a Chinese man – found in a forever embrace on a dried-up creek bed on Tagalaka country, in North Queensland,” Riley says.
“Their love affair and the ripples it had on co-creator Jasmin Sheppard – who is a descendant of the pair – is at the core of the work, which explores the deep connections between migrants and First Nations people, the challenges that each faced and what drove them throughout their life.
“It’s the type of story we don’t really tell about our history. And I’m incredibly proud to be bringing it to ADT, especially during our 60th year.”
In Two Blood things are in constant, sometimes explosive opposition, with the work embracing multiplicity at every level.
“The choreography is hard and soft throughout the work – there’s moments of hard-hitting combat and then the most delicate, almost romantic, moments of intimacy between the dancers,” Riley says.
“The music, from Singapore-based group SAtheCollective and Jaadwa composer James Howard, is this mix of awesome spiky punk freakouts and some cloud-like electronic soundscapes that are so lush and beautiful.
“The work embraces video, text and movement. It’s a tapestry, it’s got multiple identities. Two Blood is made up of many component parts that make it better and stronger. A lot like us.”
As Two Blood continues to take shape in the studio before premiering at OzAsia Festival, and keeps moving even the people close to it, it becomes clear that ADT isn’t interested in distance, slowing down or resting on its laurels. This is dance at eye-level. Unafraid to connector ask big questions. It looks you in the eye and asks you to look, really look, at yourself and your place in the world. It is work that forces us to think more deeply about the ground we all walk on, and the community we find ourselves in.
Two Blood premieres at The Odeon from October 28 to November 1 as part of OzAsia Festival and AGSA’s Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. Tickets are available here.
