Antony’s work exists so explicitly in the visual field. My colleague Niomi Cherney, academic and dance person, gave me this definition of the word “techne”: “to bring the immaterial into determinate presence or experience through expression in some kind of language, both art and artifice.” Antony’s work rides a particular expression of this, bringing the immateriality of movement into precision and repeatability, crafted so carefully that one can only assume the decisions have significance. Watching choreography is so difficult – Yvonne Rainer’s aphorism that “dance is hard to see” will never not be a reference point of mine – and when choreographers work specifically on making things exact and repeatable I think so much about meaning. How do decisions get made? What is the reason, the language, for this sequence, this gesture, this detail? The nuance of Antony’s craftsmanship feels grammatical, but at once offering a viewer the reality that any understanding we take away from watching dance can only be partial. It can never really mean anything but our search for definition is sort of the meaning itself. Working in his last year in residence at Dancemakers, Antony will spend time researching a work created for an installation setting in collaboration with a local designer.
Antony Hamilton is an independent choreographer. His award-winning creations involve a sophisticated melding of movement, sound and visual design. His major works include the seminal Black Project 1 (2012), internationally acclaimed MEETING (2015) and NYX for the 2015 Melbourne Festival. He has created numerous national and international commissions including Keep Everything and I Like This for Chunky Move, Black Project 3 for The Lyon Opera Ballet,and Sentinel for Skanes Dansteater. Antony was the inaugural recipient of the Russell Page Fellowship in 2004, the Tanja Liedtke Fellowship in 2009, a Creative Australia Fellowship in 2012, and the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in 2014. He was a guest dance curator at The National Gallery of Victoria in 2013-14, honorary Resident Director of Lucy Guerin Inc. in 2014, and inaugural Resident Artist at Arts House in 2015.
Artistic Statement
My practice sits at the nexus of experimentation, with a multitude of disciplinary interests interwoven through the different works. Following instinct and intuition, I develop self-contained fully realized parallel worlds for the theatre that seem to have their own laws, logic and rituals. I am concerned with developing both formal choreographic language, and also hyper-real theatrical situations. In 2008 I formed Antony Hamilton Projects to create contemporary performances informed by an interest in multi-disciplinary practices. In these works I may combine experimental movement, visual art, costume, sound design, video or lighting to achieve an enigmatic outcome.