Australian Dance Theatre. Co-Directors Daniel Riley. Jasmin Sheppard, S. Shakthidharan. Carriageworks Sydney: 13 – 15 August, 2026; Art House Wyong: 20 August & Monash Performing Arts Centre: 5 September.
Reviewed : 13 August, 2026
Two Blood begins with a softly told gold rush story of the skeletons of a Tagalaka woman and Cantonese man found entwined in a “forever embrace” centuries after their forbidden love led to their death in the “flames of burning country”.
Stories like theirs epitomise the complex historical ancestries of Australia. That remarkable complexity is elevated powerfully and honestly in this significant piece of theatre that reaches across time and distance, history and politics.
Performed by Zoe Wozniak, Yilin Kong, Maacon Escobal-Riley, Joshua Doctor, Remy Rochester, Carly Sheppard and Zachary Lopez Two Blood is a compelling statement that is at once violent and beautiful, volatile and poignant.
Daniel Riley, Jasmin Sheppard and S. Shakthidharan have combined dance, poetry, song, sound and light to create a performance shows how colliding cultures have left lasting imprints on our relationship to this land and each other. Riley and Sheppard’s choreography is diverse, almost desperate at times. There is a challenging complexity in the movement that stretches low and fast at times, unwinding across distance and time, yet unbelievably slow at others, protracted, almost paralysed.
Bodies reaching out and up, or cling together, suddenly pushing away as voices, and weapons, and opposing beliefs threaten to divide. There is pain in reaching arms, pleading faces and collapsing contours and low, sorrowful moans.
The dancers speak at times in English, Kaurna, Tagalaka, Tagalog, Hokkien and Yuwaalaraay, sometimes at length, sometimes in wispy phrases that reinforce their own diverse ancestry that is picked up by composers James Howard and Andy Qilong in music that moves from whisper-soft prayers to harsh, insistent drumming and strumming.
Lighting designer Matthew Adey uses two movable screens enclose the performers at times then stretch away giving space and wide distance. Wide strips of light race across the space at time or threaten from above at others as the performers “peel back the hidden truth of our nation to reveal enduring connections between First Peoples and migrants … to find the beauty of love, depth of cultural sharing, and an understanding of the connection of our ancestors”. (Jasmin Sheppard).
Two Blood is described as ‘urgent dance theatre about who we are and who we always have been”. “Urgent” might seem an unusual word to describe dance theatre, but as well as being a compelling, creative homage to the “deep complex histories beneath the surface of this country”, Two Blood also infers a call out to those who would deny the importance of “the multiplicity at the core of Australian identity”.
First published in Stage Whispers magazine.
* Opening performance