The Tender
Artist. Amrita Hepi
Organisation. AGNSW
Year: 2019
Amrita Hepi – b. 1989 Townsville, Queensland. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia.
Amrita Hepi’s choreographic score The Tender (2019) formed part of The National: New Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW venue of this three venue exhibition (the other venues being Carriageworks and the MCA).
The Tender is performed by ten different dancers whose movements and interactions are modulated according to the aberrant rhythmic scheme of the piece. The choreographic framework is built around rope and the act of skipping. Hepi cites the significance of rope in images and metaphors of both restraint and resistance, her choreography pivots on the build and release of tension and interrogates the emotive force and expressive potential of a set of gestures: to buck; to skip; to embrace; to relinquish.
The Tender unfolds as a progression of encounters between bodies, colours, sounds, movements, lights and architectures. It was performed on three different occasions in the main entrance court to the Art Gallery of NSW.
Amrita Hepi (b. 1989) is a First Nations choreographer and dancer from Bundjulung (Aus) and Ngāpuhi (NZ) territories. Her mission as an artist is to push the barriers of intersectionality and make work that garners multiple access points through allegories from the body and objects. An artist with a broad following and reach, her work has taken various forms (film, performance, sculpture, text, lecture, participatory installation) but always begins from working with the body as a point of archive, memory and resistance.
The Keir Foundation is delighted to commission and support the development of this project.
