indian Link’s

Acontemporary dance and music collaboration between choreographer and director Shaun Parker and composer Nick Wales, Am I will be performed as a world premiere for Sydney Festival at the Sydney Opera House. Exploring the quintessential meaning of “I”, Am I asks the audience “Am I my tribe? Am I my genetic blueprint? Am I a random cosmological sequence?”

“Set sometime in the near future, [Am I explores] seven individuals [who] seek to re-establish a new civilisation, observing the frailties and mishaps of those that have gone before them,” reads the Sydney Festival website. “Religion meets science in this new world order as society fluctuates between conflict and harmony”.

Through Am I, Parker “Wants to push the choreographic language to the next level in the sense that it’s visceral, it’s physical, it’s highly articulate, and it’s complex in a way that we are as humans,” he told Indian Link. This self-devised piece integrates live music, voice and dance with ancient fan and stick weaponry as it explores culture and anthropology. “It’s a very contemporary dance language, it’s now,” said Parker, and it uses “a lot of locking and popping movement”.

Due to the improvised nature of the piece, each of the 14 extraordinary dancers, musicians and singers were able to add their