REBELLIOUS BODIES: Making Dance in the 21st Century

In a performance lecture incorporating film and live dance, Sue Healey looks back on a 40-year career in order to look forward.

5 DECEMBER 2026
SATURDAY 7PM

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

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

Modern dance was born rebellious. At the turn of the 20th century, the first cameras captured these pioneer dancers who challenged how bodies could move and be seen. More than a century later, we face another revolution: AI can generate bodies that never existed and choreographies that were never danced. What happens to us when the body becomes technologically reproducible? Is the dancing body still an act of rebellion? Drawing on the collaboration of dance and cinema, and her own practice as a choreographer and filmmaker, Sue asks what a breathing, ageing, unpredictable body can offer that technology cannot – and whether, in the age of AI, the human body might be our most radical medium of dissent.

Further information

Sue Healey is one of Australia’s leading interdisciplinary dance artists, working across live performance, cinema and installation. She received the Australia Council Award for Dance 2021. Over 4 decades she has built a body of work that spans theatre stages, galleries, international film festivals, and international collaborations through a project-based ensemble model. Recent works include AFTERWORLD (Sydney Festival 2025), ON VIEW: ICONS (Sydney Festival 2024), and BRINK, a new major live and cinematic work currently in development for 2027. Since 2000 from her Sydney base, Healey has developed 4 major series of work - NICHE, IN TIME, CURIOSITIES and ON VIEW - exploring space, time, portraiture, landscape, and the nexus between body and moving image. The ON VIEW series has toured internationally, with iterations presented in Hong Kong, Japan and Australia, including PANORAMIC SUITE at Liveworks Festival and Freespace, West Kowloon Cultural District, PANORAMA at Aka Renga Yokohama and ICONS at OzAsia Festival Adelaide. Healey trained at the Victorian College of the Arts and was a founding member of Dance Works Company Melbourne from 1983-88, before undertaking further study in New York with the Merce Cunningham School and Trisha Brown Company. She later served as Artistic Director of Vis-à-Vis Dance Canberra and has operated as a commissioned artist since 1996, with many works created and presented in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Healey holds a Masters in Choreography from University of Melbourne and received the Australia Council Creative Fellowship and the Robert Helpmann Scholarship. She was made an Honorary Fellow of the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017.

More info here: https://www.suehealey.com/

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

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: Sue Healey, Knee Deep in Thin Air, 1992.
Image Description: An image of a dancer captured in flight, jumping with her back arched, eyes closed and arms stretching behind her. Beside the dancer is a figure with a face and eyes gazing towards the dancer. The figure is a readymade object constructed from mannequin parts and other materials.

Contact the host of Sue Healey – SeeDance#2

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