Perth dance company Co3 combines classic and modern dance styles with rave action to boot

When I was living in Sydney, I would be invited annually to an amazing event known as the Cointreau Ball. This grand event hosted some 400 influential people from all walks of business and the arts, to criss-cross ideas and to get to know each other a little better. This was all pre-Instagram and TikTok so when you were a follower, you had to tell someone to their face. It was an event where networking, drinking and dancing was shared by various cultural types – and that was before diversity was big. I bring this up because on occasion, guests were asked to bring a gift for one of the other attendees (it must have been some French tradition). Names were drawn out of a hat and people paired up to buy inspirational pressies for one another. One year I got Graeme Murphy as my gifter and giftee. Graeme was renowned as Sydney’s most prominent dance choreographer and instructor. I recall I buying Graeme something from Tiffany’s. He gifted me a season’s worth of dance productions. Now, before you can dub the guy a cheapskate (incidentally, I used to receive complimentary tickets from his dance company and those would have sufficed), I must admit that my calendar that particular year was filled with more wonderful dance productions than Debbie Allen on Fame could poke critique at. I witnessed so many forms of dance – drawn from so many cultures – that I almost wanted to pick up a pair of slip-ons and audition for productions myself. Suffice to say, running a magazine kept me busy instead (also, audiences don’t need to see me delivering my best Rubberband Girl moves). So thank you, Graeme, for the many awe-inspiring productions. Now, a recent viewing of talent from Perth dance company, Co3, brought back a lot of those awesome feelings, only instead of sitting in an Opera House theatre, guests here were allowed to roam around the room at will, moving around the dance troupe as it made its way here and there around a ballroom-type hall. As it turned out, the space was Liberty Theatre, which I learnt (on that night) was once a movie theatre that showed porn clips for punters in brown raincoats. It is now where Co3 rehearse and perform (a notion even I’m more comfortable with), and on this particular occasion the audience was presented with a taste of their show Gathering 1, a part of their 2025 season.

Gathering 1 is one exceptional piece of dance work, or should I say works? There were so many different styles of dance, and many blended permutations of these, that it took me right back to that year of watching non-stop Graeme Murphy productions in all their sweat, blood and glamour glory.

Here, though, the inspired and inspiring moves came from artistic muses Mitch Harvey, Logan Ringshaw, Kimberley Parkin, and Raewyn Hill. The production begins with a troupe of dancers (I counted 10) standing on a 2-metre-square podium, moving limbs and heads separately and yet seemingly connected – as though they were one beautiful, ethereal beast waking from slumber. Now, it’s no mean feat to fit 10 people onto a two-by-two metre stage, let alone have every one of them perform as though in freeform and yet never knocking into one other by accident. This was either excellent choreography or blessed synchronicity, and either way it works to impress. As the night was also a celebration of Co3’s tenth anniversary, it made sense that the troupe soon enough got off the podium, and made its way onto the dance floor (literally, we’re like in a ballroom-type place here, remember). The dance circle expanded out, and the party guests mingled around the performers who delivered a kind of celebration of unity and individuality all at once. As for the variety of dance there were ballet-like moves and krump-type moves, soft willowy Wuthering Heights-like moves, and esoteric maneouvres looking as though having been inspired by the Orient and the Eastern Bloc, even the east village in New York. Heck, there was even good ol’ ’70s disco and ’90s-style raving in there.

From classical to club to street and back, Co3’s repertoire appears well-studied and is certainly excellently executed. Each dancer possesses a unique set of movements and nuances but together they morph into a kind of syntagmatic magic.

Not only do the dancers handle the delicacy of self-consciousness, and that occasional tough tiff all performers must have with ego, but master the art of moving constantly around a room for sixty minutes straight, and doing so without stepping on another’s toes. Even if they did so in future productions, it wouldn’t bother me, for everything else these responsive and reflexive dancers do ought to make up for the slightest slip-up. Again, none was seen. I hadn’t viewed a Co3 production since 2015 when I once interviewed members of the troupe on an arts show on RTRFM’s Artbeat. Since then, the company appears to have improved in leaps and bounds – which, of course you’ll see a lot of in the rest of the 2025 season. Antonino Tati  

Next up for Co3 is their production In the Shadow of Time, devised and directed by Raewyn Hill, and created in collaboration with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Tickets and more information available at co3.org.au.  

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