INDance 2025: Sydney Dance Company Gets Wilder and Unfiltered

Sydney Dance Company’s INDance season is back this August, handing the stage to choreographers who thrive on keeping contemporary dance restless and alive.

Across two weekends at the Neilson Studio in Walsh Bay, four full-length “perspective shifting” productions will explore unpredictability, draw on pop culture, and toy with form.

INDance returns with raw energy and its most daring works yet

Staged in the studio’s intimate black-box space, where audiences sit just metres from the performers, dance feels immediate and unfiltered.

Far from slick spectacles, these are works with the raw edges still showing, and that’s the point.

This year’s program features five formidable and distinct artists shaping Australian choreography: Rebecca Jensen, Amy Zhang, Alison Currie with Alisdair Macindoe, and Jo Lloyd.

Each has been selected by a panel led by Sydney Dance Company’s Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela, who calls this year’s lineup the most daring so far, urging audiences to “come with curiosity” rather than set expectations.

Week One opens with Slip by Rebecca Jensen, a work that slides between bodies and identities, playing with a hall of mirrors as everything appears to fold in on itself.

Later, Amy Zhang’s [ gameboy ] takes a sharp, satirical look at digital culture, with glitching dancers caught between nostalgia and critique.

Week Two belongs first to Alison Currie and Alisdair Macindoe’s Progress Report, an experimental piece where props, set and sound turn into moving parts as much as the performers themselves.

Then Jo Lloyd’s FM Air wraps the season in her signature eccentricity, looping rhythm and movement into something hypnotic and uncanny.

Witness bold contemporary dance in the making

Taken together, the performances don’t tidy themselves up for the mainstage. Instead they thrive on being tested in real time, dance in the making. The very essence of INDance is to give fringe choreographers the room to stretch, stumble, and soar in front of an audience.

Since 2021, the program has carved out a loyal following for the chance to see choreography rarely seen on Sydney’s stages. Many works born here later tour nationally, but INDance is where they first land.

Bonachela calls INDance part of Sydney Dance Company’s DNA.

“Our commitment is about supporting independent dance,” he says. “Each year, the calibre of work highlights the depth and creativity driving the sector.”

The Neilson Foundation backs the initiative, but on the floor it’s the artists themselves who drive its urgency. This year’s cohort have reputations for making work that’s smart, slippery, and rarely straightforward.

If you’re expecting a neat evening of polished ballet, you’re in the wrong theatre.

That unpredictability is what keeps audiences coming back. Whether it’s Zhang’s dancers riffing on 8-bit nostalgia, or Lloyd’s bodies looping through a strange trance, the works ask viewers to lean into the weirdness rather than escape it.

In a city increasingly dominated by blockbusters and safe bets, INDance shows that independent art can steal the centre.

INDance 2025 runs from 14 – 23 August at Sydney Dance Company’s Nielson Studio in Walsh Bay. For more information, visit sydneydancecompany.com