This year’s interdisciplinary project is a rearrangement of material from Merce Cunningham’s Ocean (1994), a work he conceived with John Cage, although Cage died before it could be produced.  Celebrating 30 years since its premier at the Cirque Royal in Brussels, the Cunningham Trust, through dancer Melissa Toogood, has given permission for us to work with elements of the work and to respond to its teeming offers. A two-part programme sees the dancers perform an arrangement of the original choreography directed by Toogood and their response to its teeming offers, conceptually and choreographically, through a group devising process.

The title Ocean comes from the suggestion by Joseph Campbell that the next work James Joyce would have written (after Finnegan’s Wake) would be about water and the ocean.  Cage’s idea was that the dance be presented in the center of a circular space with the audience surrounding the dancers and both audience and performers submerged in sound.  The ocean is thus a potent symbol for redefining audience relationship to the theatre.  For this iteration, we invite you to engage with the signature moves and compositional processes of Cunningham’s choreographic oeuvre and experience the student’s response to the dance. In 2006 I had the honor of working with Dance Umbrella on a response to Ocean at London’s Roundhouse with young artists from North London, I am thrilled to see how VCA Dance, Design and Production students embody this work for the first time within an Australian context.

- Carol Brown, Head of VCA Dance