Rosalind Crisp & Deborah May – SeeDance#1

DIRt (Dance In Regional disasTer zones)

Rosalind Crisp (dance) & Deborah May (video) share seedlings of new DIRt work: live and virtual performance in conversation.

10 OCTOBER 2026
SATURDAY 4PM

THE DRILL HALL, CRITICAL PATH
1C NEW BEACH ROAD, DARLING POINT, NSW, 2027
GADIGAL & BIRRABIRRAGAL COUNTRY

Pay what you can $5 – $15 (+ booking fee)

In 2017 Ros returned to Australia after 15 years in Paris to find the majestic forests she grew up in destroyed. She initiated DIRt in Orbost (VIC) to explore how dance and collaborative arts practice might respond to our unfolding extinction crisis. DIRt performances have been given in sites from ruined forest to the Sydney Opera House. 

Ros writes: DIRt has primarily been an exploration of choreography’s capacity to enter into dialogue with this place, not to re-present it or impose another narrative on it, but to be profoundly ‘undone’ by it.

DIRt has utterly reshaped my Australian choreographic voice.

A recent shift from the grief-stricken to the absurd is angling Ros away from the abject towards the forgotten, discarded sites left over by man where fragments of nature persist and may even be thriving (and winking at Gilles Clément.)

Further information

Rosalind Crisp is a contemporary dancer and choreographer based in Orbost, regional Victoria on land of the Gunnai-Kurnai, Bidewel and Manero-Ngarigo. Since 2021, the Orbost Studio for Dance Research hosts local, national & international artist residencies. For over 40 years, Ros has relentlessly explored dancing, alone in the studio and in collaboration with long term colleagues, Lizzie Thomson, Olivia Millard, Céline Debyser, Isabelle Ginot, Susan Leigh Foster, Andrew Morrish….  With an international team she has produced over 30 major works that challenge dance’s capacity to respond to the world we are impacting, touring to hundreds of festivals in Europe, Asia & Australia. Most recently, Seen Unseen, commissioned by Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company (formerly the Forsythe Co.), performed for over 4,000 people. Ros has developed a teaching method from her choreographic research practice for which she is sought after around the world (HZT, DOCH, The Place, Laban, VCA…). In 2008/2009, she was guest professor at HZT University Berlin and in 2014 made an honorary fellow of the University of Melbourne-VCA. Ros was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2015 and is the 2025 recipient of the Creative Australia Award for Dance.

More info here: https://www.omeodance.com/dirt

Deborah May (video) has directed and produced multi-screen installations, large-scale multi-camera productions, documentaries and promotional films, working with some of the world's leading artists and arts organisations, as well as producing a number of short, experimental, cutting-edge films with visual and performance artists. Deborah studied Fine Art, in South Africa and at St Martin's School of Art, London, and worked in the theatre, a museum, a university art school, the United Nations film department, an animation studio, a film production company, and the BBC. In recent years Deborah has worked extensively in the disability arts sector, in London and Perth, as a mentor and collaborator. Currently working in Sydney as a multi-media artist and film maker specialising in contemporary music and dance.

This event is proudly supported by the Woollahra Municipal Council’s Cultural Grants Program and Omeo Dance Inc.

Critical Path respectfully acknowledges the Gadigal and Birrabirragal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land where the organisation is based.

Image Credit: DIRt, Rosalind Crisp, video still by Deborah May, 2026.
Image Description: An image of a person standing amidst the destruction of a recently logged forest in East Gippsland.