The Box, Freespace, West Kowloon | Freespace Dance 2025: Chunky Move – U>N>I>T>E>D

Description

A bold, visually striking and genre-defying work where earthly forms commune with the gods of the machine world

Meticulous and otherworldly, U>N>I>T>E>D by Melbourne-based Chunky Move – one of Australia’s most innovative performing arts companies – offers an epic vision of machine mysticism that explores the persistence of spirituality in a post-industrial digital age.

In exoskeleton costumes created from repurposed motorcycle armour, six masterful dancers are transformed into post-human, tech-adorned hybrid beings. Performing against a driving soundtrack of gamelan-infused, Javanese trance-inspired techno beats, they move alone or tightly as one, merging elements of contemporary dance and street dance practices with Artistic Director Antony Hamilton’s distinctive choreographic language and methodology. Through choreographic precision, physical endurance, and complex times and rhythms, the work generates a mesmerising tension between music and bodies where sound and visuals align and deviate.

Created over three years in Melbourne, Bali and Taipei, U>N>I>T>E>D is a major international collaboration with acclaimed Balinese experimental music collective Gabber Modus Operandi, Bali-based streetwear label Future Loundry, Australian global leaders in animatronic design, Creature Technology Co., and award-winning lighting designer Benjamin Cisterne.

The production premiered at AsiaTOPA in Melbourne in February 2025, and is the latest work in the canon of Chunky Move Artistic Director Antony Hamilton’s “speculative future” performances, following recent innovative dance experiences Token Armies (2019) and Yung Lung (2022).