GRAEME MURPHY’S SUITE SYNERGY

Choreographer Graeme Murphy has been in high demand since leaving the Sydney Dance Company. He’s been working on films, operas and ballets all over the world. “Then suddenly there was a tap on my shoulder and two of my old works were saying, ‘Daddy, we’ve come back to haunt you’,” says Murphy.

The works he is referring to are Synergy and Free Radicals. They’ve been merged to make an energetic, percussion piece Suite Synergy by a new privately funded dance company, Mod Dance Company.

Murphy promises Suite Synergy will be a work of accessible, high-energy movement.  It combines two quite different pieces which both feature percussion. Synergy is a large-scale production about man and machinery, with an industrial and complicated set. Free Radicals is an intimate piece that sits on the opposite end of the spectrum.   “What’s really happened is that a completely new animal has been born, with different climaxes and a whole different sort of wave length of energy,” says Murphy.

While Murphy is excited to revisit his earlier work, he is also thrilled to work in a dance company that has been established without government funding and that seeks to bring dance to a wider audience. “It’s more liberating for artists like myself not to have to spend a lot of time answering bureaucratic questions,” says Murphy. “Sometimes I feel in contemporary dance, people are excluded, and I feel that this is a work that is very inclusive. Fingers crossed, a lot of hope, and a lot of wishes that the public really get behind this and support it.”

Apr 6-9, Lyric Theatre, Star City, $64-125, ticketmaster.com.au