Renée Copraij and Phillip Adams in Conversation

Renée Copraij and Phillip Adams met in the 90s while working in New York for Dennis O Connor. Over past three decades they have continued to work at the radical, avant-garde edge of dance and performing arts practices. Through this conversation, Renée and Phillip reflect on their intersecting and disparate experiences of shaping and influencing the experimental performing arts scenes, locally and internationally.

Perhaps, they may even do a dance...

This conversation will be facilitated by Rebecca Hilton.

DATE & TIME Friday 15th May, 7pm-8.30pm
IN CONVERSATION with Renée Copraij & Phillip Adams
FACILITATOR Rebecca Hilton
REGISTRATION Support Temperance Hall by paying as you can
LOCATION Temperance Hall Main Hall, 199 Napier St South Melbourne

Renée Copraij is an Apartment Studio Resident at Temperance Hall across May

Piloted in 2025, Temperance Hall's Apartment Studio Residency provides opportunities for artists travelling from near and afar to develop and share new artistic research/experiments with local audiences while living on-site in our Apartment Studio.

ARTIST AND FACILITATOR BIOS

RENEÉ COPRAIJ has had a prolific impact across the international performing visual arts fields over the past three decades. Working in the 90s as a performer and dramturg for Jan Fabre, she currently spends most of her time collaborating with Florentina Holzinger.

Copraij has cultivated a practice of embodied rigour and vigour—an endurance of integrity. This practice is informed by over two decades of practising Vinjana yoga—the bedrock of her radical performance practice.

For many years, Copraij taught choreography workshops at the SNDO in Amsterdam and was artistic advisor for many students. She was curator for Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht where she programmed and produced work on the verge of visual arts and theatre.

From 2012 till 2016 Copraij curated the guest-artists program for ICKamsterdam and returned to performing with Florentina Holzinger, Vincent Riebeek and Marten Spangberg, amongst others.

In 2017 she founded DANSCO, an organisation which represents the work of artists active in the field of dance with whom she has an enduring artistic relationship. Currently, Copraij spends most of her time collaborating with Florentina Holzinger and doing dramaturgy for various artists like among others Cherish Menzo, Maria Kozlowska, Jan Martens and Andreas Hannes.

Copraij studied dance and art-history and is a certified Vijnana yoga teacher. The yoga has become a tool for observation for the world within and around her.

PHILLIP ADAMS is an Australia choreographer with a legacy of trailblazing work across a 30-year career. His body of work has set a benchmark for choreographic innovation, social and cultural provocation, and audacious queer expression within the forms of experimental dance, performance, design, fashion, photography, film and the visual arts. Phillip holds a rich repository of embodied knowledge that significantly shaped the cultural heritage of Australian contemporary dance.

After graduating from VCA in 1988, Phillip lived in New York performing with many companies and independent choreographers. Returning to Australia, Phillip was founder and artistic director of Phillip Adams BalletLab, (1999 -2023) considered to be one of the most influential Australian dance companies, distinguished by constant innovation and radical blending of choreography, visual and performance art. Within BalletLab’s repertoire lies 22 critically acclaimed works that have toured globally and garnered a plethora of prestigious awards.

Phillip has been commissioned by esteemed dance companies, public museums and galleries including, The Australian Ballet, Chunky Move, Dance Works Rotterdam (Nederlands), Niteroi City Ballet (Brazil), BANFF (Canada) NGV, HEIDE, Melbourne Museum, AGNSW, MPavilion and MONA among others.

In 2016 Phillip established an exemplary dance, performance and arts venue Temperance Hall in South Melbourne. In 2018, He received the Australia Council Award for Dance, and the Green Room Lifetime Achievement Award.

REBECCA HILTON is a dance person. A Professor Emerita at Stockholm University of the Arts, her usual research environments are inter art form, transdisciplinary, and collaborative with a focus on unfolding relationships between embodied practices, oral traditions and choreographic systems. Her ongoing artistic research project GROUPNESS (2000-) manifests as a series of long-term residencies situated in universities, hospitals, dance companies, community groups, friendship circles and family units in Australia, Korea, Mexico, Argentina, the UK and Sweden etc.

Over four decades as a performer she has contributed to the work of an array of artists, including Russell Dumas, Stephen Petronio, Mathew Barney, Michael Clark, Tere O’Connor, Jennifer Monson, John Jasperse, Lucy Guerin, Tino Sehgal, Xavier Le Roy, Scarlet Yu, Chrysa Parkinson etc.

Hilton has contributed chapters to several anthologies, most recently Bare Bodies – Thresholding Life, de Gruyter (2023), she has co-edited the collections Researching in/As Motion, Nivel/ Teak (2019), and Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond dance, Routledge (2024). She has been a member of the Movement Research Artist Advisory council (NY), the boards of Dancehouse, Lucy Guerin Inc, the dance board of Creative Australia, the community Arts board of Creative Victoria, as well as an advisor to various academic and artistic contexts including the Tanya Liedtke Foundation, the Keir Choreographic Award, the Icelandic Research Council, Uniarts Helsinki, Westminster University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, the Public Health and Palliative Care International Conference committee etc. 

Images courtesy of the artists and Stan Arte Vizion