Workshop_Joel Bray

Workshop Info.
Date｜2023/11/20 (Mon.) - 11/24 (Fri.) 14:00-18:00
Language of Instruction｜English
Additional Info. for Participants｜ Prior dance experience required

Workshop Description

Joel Bray's practice extends to performance making and choreography, writing for performance and  audience participation practices. Across the week, Joel will share his methodologies and skills in movement development and writing. Workshop participants will develop skills in engaging audiences smoothly and consensually in participatory performance, a signature feature of Joel's works. The workshop will culminate in weaving these elements together into his unique form of participatory dance-theatre.

A Brief Biography of Artist

Australia｜Joel Bray 
Living in Naarm (Melbourne), Joel Bray is a proud Wiradjuri man who danced in Europe with Kolben Dance, FRESCO Dance Company, Roy Assaf and Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor, and in Australia with CHUNKY MOVE.
Joel’s intimate dance-theatre encounters in unorthodox spaces spring from his Wiradjuri heritage, and use humor to engage audiences in rituals about sex, history, trauma and healing. His experimental work challenges white audience expectations of Aboriginal performance and blur the colonial genres.
His works Biladurang (2017), Dharawungara (CHUNKY MOVE, 2018), Daddy (Yirramboi Festival 2019), Considerable Sexual License (Yirramboi 2021), I Liked It, BUT (2021) and Garabari (2022) have toured to the Brisbane, Sydney, Darwin, Midsumma, Auckland, LiveWorks and Dance Massive Festivals, and to the Arts Centre Melbourne and Canberra Theatre Centre. Joel’s seven-channel video installation called Giraru Galing Ganhagirri (The Wind Will Bring the Rain) was presented at the National Gallery of Australia, and since toured nationally and internationally. 
Joel was the 2019 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow and this research into Ancient Wiradjuri ceremonial practices continues, in collaboration with Wiradjuri elders, to inform all of Joel’s work. Joel was the inaugural CHUNKY MOVE Choreographer-in-Residence 2021-2022, is a member of the Melbourne Fringe Board and was a 2020 Sydney Dance Company New Breed choreographer.

photo by BryonyJackson_LoRes