IMMERSE: Contemporary Lab with Max Burgess

Poetics, Semiotics, and Space:

The body is a rich catalyst for narrative. Through poetic text, Max has been notating this narrative to generate choreography.

In this process, poetic text is generated in response to improvisation, serving as a descriptive indexing of experience.

This indexing is then the genesis of choreography, providing a narrative for the body to repeat and proffer once more.

These texts can be deconstructed to create sporadic glimpses of choreography, symbolic of entire stanzas.

Furthermore, this library of choreography generated in response to poetic text can begin to play with the environment that surrounds, creating a poetics of space.

Join Max in exploring this practice, and experiencing its potential for choreographic impetus.

Max Burgess

Max Burgess (they/them) is a queer artist based between Naarm (Melbourne) and Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country (Canberra), whose practice spans the realms of dance, poetry, and dramaturgy.

Max found dance through Fresh Funk, a Hip-Hop dance organisation based out of the Tuggeranong Arts Centre in Ngunnwal and Ngambri Country, where they developed a deep adortion for the form, its capacity to form and future community, and its ability to exchange narrative.

Max has had many fruitful opportunities to collaborate closely with companies, artists, and choreographers across so-called Australia. These include Stephanie Lake Company, Lucy Guerin Inc., Melanie Lane, Larissa McGowan, Louis Grant, You Are Here Canberra, Performance Space, Australian Dance Party, InPlay Projects, QL2 Canberra, Canberra Dance Theatre, and Ainslie and Gorman Arts.

At the core of Max’s practice lies queerness. Max perceives queerness as this amorphous entity with unyielding power to shift, reform, and revitalise what already exists.