In summation
With a sense of hope
Consequence
Open rehearsal and work-in-progress showing
Sandra Parker
Saturday 6th December, 2025
Temperance Hall
199 Napier Street, South Melbourne
Critics’ Picks 2025, on Fjord Review features my last piece for 2025 in a line-up of 2025 highlights from all contributors.
Something brief, before the year is out. A wee ‘best of’ contribution for Fjord Review.
For me, the ‘best’ is always the last work seen. The one I am thinking about. The one not necessarily to be replaced by the next, but the focus, for now. In the present. And it is during the ‘in the present’, open-ended moments, in the repeated pauses held, that there is space to think about what might lie ahead.
For the year ahead, I am looking forward to seeing more dance and in turn trying to shape what I felt into words on the page; to taking you with me, once more, to the theatre or a former Temperance Hall.
Throughout the year, our critics attend hundreds of dance performances, whether onsite, outdoors, or on the proscenium stage, around the world. To cap the year that was, we asked each writer to highlight their most outstanding performance of 2025. What follows are our critics' highlights of the year, in no particular order.
…
Sandra Parker’s Consequence
In a world where the certainty of a future is not a given, for my ‘best’ performance of 2025, I am rolling with a work-in-progress showing of Sandra Parker’s Consequence. Shown in still-forming, unfixed state, the dancers — Jazmyn Carter, Benjamin Hurley, Rachel Mackie, and Oliver Savariego — held sculptural poses. In an unpredictable world, the dancers held unseen forms in space. Consequence sprang from the root of the upward movement, and in the stillness, there was living, breathing humanness. In the quartet, though all moved as one, there was individuality, from a shoulder rolled further forward or a head tilted upward. They made a mycelial network, and moved as if water and nutrients flowed through their ecosystem. They made a telepathic network, and moved as if ideas and thoughts flowed freely between each other. Connectivity allows a line to be drawn to Ian McEwan’s novel, What We Can Know, as Parker discussed with Jo Lloyd in the Q&A session which followed. There in the room, the same sense of looking back, from the submerged vantage of 2199, in the full face of the climate emergency, to 2014 and the choices knowingly made by the few at the top for the many below. A world of system responsiveness, of consequences.
As the dancers spoke about how the sustained pauses required them to be particularly present as they thought about each other and what comes next, the same could also be used to describe the climate emergency: thinking about what comes next. What, too, lies ahead for a work-in-progress, and will the site specificity of the next location change it? In a former Temperance Hall in South Melbourne on a damp, grey summer’s day, let this peep at something as it grows, and because of what it foretells, be my highlight for ’25. As the dancers repeated sequences, they evoked a sense of hope as they re-learned ways of being in the world, whatever her state.
— Gracia Haby
Image credit: Membership Card — Emerald Hill Total Abstinence Society
“The Melbourne Total Abstinence Society was one of several organisations in nineteenth century Victoria established to promote temperance, oppose the extension of hotel licences, and educate children and adults about the dangers of alcohol. Others were the Order of the Sons of Temperance, the International Order of Good Templars, and the Band of Hope.”
Source: Museums Victoria
