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In a North Melbourne rehearsal room, Amrita Hepi and Tilly Lawless are playing with their erotic power.<\/p>\n
Hepi, at 34 a well-established choreographer, has been asking Lawless, a 30-year-old writer in her first outing as a dancer, which particular movements she makes in particular intimate scenarios, drawing upon Lawless\u2019s experiences over the past decade as a sex worker, based in Sydney.<\/p>\n
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Tilly Lawless and Amrita Hepi have collaborated to create The Read.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Justin McManus<\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll show you something that\u2019s hard for me,\u201d Lawless told Hepi at one point, whipping out a set of stripper heels and proceeding to proficiently jump rope wearing these \u201cpleasers\u201d.<\/p>\n The idea for the dance work, The Read, <\/em>part of a triple dance bill under Lucy Guerin\u2019s annual artist development program Pieces<\/em>, was sown in 2019, when Hepi reached out to tell Lawless she admired her articulate online writing and her ethos in fighting the stigma faced by sex workers.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s definitely this idea of control, power, how you locate that in the body, how you perform that,\u201d says Amrita Hepi.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Justin McManus<\/cite><\/p>\n The pair became firm friends. \u201cWe\u2019re both strong personalities, sure of ourselves,\u201d says Lawless. \u201cBoth overthinkers.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2020, during lockdown, they spoke as part of Chunky Move\u2019s Activators conversation series: \u201cThe more I\u2019ve done sex work,\u201d Lawless told Hepi, \u201cthe more I\u2019ve also appreciated it as an art form, because what I do really is a performance with an audience of one or sometimes two.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve grown to understand the way I can use my body more to get a certain response from other people.\u201d<\/p>\n The pair\u2019s starting point for The Read<\/em> was that just about everybody dances, and just about everybody has sex \u2013 but those who dance or have sex for a job land somewhere \u201cbetween being a vehicle of desire and a vehicle of expression\u201d, says Hepi, with various \u201cslippages\u201d between the professions.<\/p>\n Thus arose their question for audience and client alike: What is it you want me to be?<\/p>\n So the piece is about bodily autonomy? \u201cThere\u2019s definitely this idea of control, power, how you locate that in the body, how you perform that,\u201d says Hepi, \u201cbut then also how it\u2019s asserted in certain moments.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe more I\u2019ve done sex work, the more I\u2019ve also appreciated it as an art form.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like the whole piece is about power,\u201d says Lawless. \u201cWho\u2019s guiding the performance \u2013 is it the performer, or is it the audience? There are moments when we try to make the audience think about how complicit they are.\u201d<\/p>\n Hepi adds: \u201c[But] less in like a \u2018gotcha\u2019 moment, and more that, even just in the act of witnessing something, it changes the autonomy: how much you watch and where I tell you to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n Hepi and Lawless each speak as well as dance in the 20-minute piece, using Daniel Jenatsch\u2019s baroque sound design as a framing device. Lawless, required to speak the most, says she has kept her dance moves within her capability.<\/p>\n \u201cIt probably helps that I\u2019m not in the contemporary dance scene, so I don\u2019t overthink it,\u201d says Tilly Lawless.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Justin McManus<\/cite><\/p>\n Hepi turns to her collaborator and begs to differ: \u201cYou\u2019re quite a comfortable and confident performer, and contemporary dance in Melbourne is quite broad and experimental, and there are some things you didn\u2019t think you could do that now you\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTotally,\u201d Lawless agrees. \u201cIt probably helps that I\u2019m not in the contemporary dance scene, so I don\u2019t overthink it \u2026 I feel freed from people\u2019s expectations.\u201d Nonetheless, Lawless has enjoyed the \u201caccelerated inside look\u201d at the dance world.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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