Amrita Hepi
Amrita Hepi is an award-winning First Nations choreographer and dancer from Bundjalung (Aus) and Ngapuhi (NZ) territories. Her mission as an artist is to push the barriers of intersectionality and make work that garners multiple access points through allegories.
Amrita probes ideas of authenticity; the perpetuation of culture, tradition, and a ‘decolonial imagination’ – and questioning where this now resides.
An artist with a broad following and reach, her work has taken various forms (film, performance, sculpture, text, lecture, paticipatory installation) but always begins from working with the body as a point of archive, memory and resistance.
In 2018, Amrita was the recipient of the People’s Choice Award at the Keir Choreographic Awards, and was named one of Forbes Asia’s 30 under 30. Amrita has also worked in various commercial capacities and has been commissioned by ASOS global to create and choreograph film works and has been featured globally in Vogue USA, TeenVogue USA, Instyle, Harpers Bazar and PAPER US.
She has exhibited and performed extensively internationally and nationally at Sydney Opera House, Banff Centre (Canada), Next Wave Festival, Art Central (Hong Kong), Museum of Contemporary Art, Danse Arena Nord (Norway), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, TEDxSydney, and DARK MOFO, and performed with companies including Marrugeku, Ochre Dance Company, Force Majeure, Victoria Chiu and Melanie Lane. She trained at NAISDA and Alvin Ailey American Dance School.
Mish Grigor
Mish Grigor is an artist who works in performance across a range of collaborative formats. Using autobiographical tools, humour, and fiction, she is intent on examining, wasting and/or cherishing time spent with other people. Interested in the unpredictable, Grigor frequently utilises dialogical spaces, conversational strategies, and other tools of enforced liveness.
Based in Melbourne since 2017, she is Director of APHIDS with Lara Thoms and Eugenia Lim. APHIDS functions an as umbrella under which the three artists shield themselves from the grand artist subject, in the process creating a practice that is greater than the sum of its parts. APHIDS works in various medias, from theatre to gallery contexts, text based work, and occasionally slumber parties. In 2019 APHIDS presented ‘Exit Strategies’, a work about the impossibilities of leaving histories behind, at Artshouse Melbourne. In 2020 they will present ‘HOWL’, a community parade of historically censored art, at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.
She is also one third of POST, formed in 2003, a collaboration who work between popular entertainment and experimental art practices. In 2020 POST are presenting ‘Oedipus Schmoedipus’, in both English and Cantonese, for AsiaTopa Melbourne. The work examines death inside and outside the frames of the western theatrical canon. Originally a commission from Belvoir St Theatre and Sydney Festival, it was translated and adapted for Hong Kong audiences in collaboration with Hong Kong Rep Theatre and West Kowloon Cultural Precinct, and re-adapted again for Australian audiences and diasporic Cantonese speakers. POST’s previous work ‘Ich Nibber Dibber’ was a Sydney Festival/Campbelltown Arts Centre commission which toured to Sydney Opera House and Malthouse Theatre. Another highlights is ‘Who’s The Best?’, a Sydney Theatre Company commission that toured to capital cities nationally through Performing Lines’ initiative ‘Mobile States’, and then to the Netherlands for Noorderzon Festival.
Mish also works as a performer. In 2019 she co-created ‘The Temple’, a collaboration between Malthouse Theatre and Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre, led by director Gavin Quinn. Mish’s solo piece ‘The Talk’, about changing conversations around sexuality within families, has toured extensively after its premiere for Field Theory’s ‘Site Is Set’ season. It sold out through the UK, touring to Forest Fringe (Edinburgh), Buzzcut (Glasgow), The Marlborough (Brighton) and Battersea Arts Centre (London). In Australia it was presented by Performance Space for Liveworks, Darwin Festival and PICA.
