RINSE BY AMRITA HEPI WITH MISH GRIGOR

A standout performance and work
- Dance Australia
Hepi is a consummate storyteller
- ArtsHub
One of the most in-demand artists of the moment
- The Saturday Paper

What is it about the beginning that remains intoxicating? Our persistent lust for the first rush of a romance, scene, canon, theory, relationship, meal or country.

Created by extraordinary dance artist Amrita Hepi with acclaimed theatre maker Mish Grigor, Rinse explores the romance of beginnings and what happens next, when those initial thrills begin to fade and inertia takes over. Hepi’s electric new performance questions whether being on the brink of extinction, a series of endings of various kinds, has intensified the seduction of the past.

By recreating an entropic origin myth on stage, Rinse travels from beginning to ending, weaving together autobiographical elements with the grand narratives of art, feminism, dance, the void, desire, popular culture and colonial history. An intimate yet epic solo performance based on a dynamic improvisational score, Rinse expands Hepi’s fascination with hybridity under empire and contemporary dance’s fixation with the “neutral” body.

Warning: loud sounds, partial nudity, coarse language, strobe lights, haze

• Co-writer, choreographer and performer Amrita Hepi
  Co-writer and director Mish Grigor
  Sound design and composer Daniel Jenatsch
• Lighting design Matt Adey
• Produced by Performing Lines
• European representation FleeArts, Felicitas Willems

Amrita Hepi is a multidisciplinary artist & choreographer based in Melbourne and Bangkok. Her interest as an artist is in the idea of archive; particularly in relation to the body and how it is organised by ancestry/people/events and environment. By coalescing fact and fiction, memoir and ethnography, the local and the singular into the performance/art work she makes. Amrita trained at NAISDA & Alvin Ailey NYC. A critically acclaimed artist she has twice been the winner of the people choice award for the Keir Choreographic Award, was a Forbes 30 under 30 for artist, and has shown and been commissioned nationally and internationally. Amrita is a Triad member of performance company APHIDS, on the board of directors and artistic associate for RISING festival and part of the Artistic Associate group for STRUT dance. Her commitment to collaboration and kinship are key tenets to her practice.

Mish Grigor is an artist who works in performance across a range of collaborative formats. Using autobiographical tools, humour, and fiction, she is intent on examining, wasting and/or cherishing time spent with other people. Interested in the unpredictable, Grigor frequently utilises dialogical spaces, conversational strategies, and other tools of enforced liveness. Based in Melbourne since 2017, she is Director of APHIDS with Lara Thoms and Eugenia Lim. APHIDS functions an as umbrella under which the three artists shield themselves from the grand artist subject, in the process creating a practice that is greater than the sum of its parts. APHIDS works in various medias, from theatre to gallery contexts, text based work, and occasionally slumber parties. Mish’s solo piece The Talk, about changing conversations around sexuality within families, has toured extensively after its premiere for Field Theory’s Site Is Set season. It sold out through the UK, touring to Forest Fringe (Edinburgh), Buzzcut (Glasgow), The Marlborough (Brighton) and Battersea Arts Centre (London).

Rinse is produced by Performing Lines, and is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, and the New South Wales Government through Create NSW.