Everyone dances, everyone has sex. Though the line for a professional in these industries is different.
The body performs. The body sells. The body shifts, moving through intimate spaces. Good, masochistic and disciplined. The Act is a compelling theatrical experience that challenges audiences to reconsider their assumptions about art, work, and bodily autonomy.
Amrita Hepi is a Bunjalung Ngapuhi dancer and artist, whose work has continually explored the dilemma of authenticity. Here she collaborates with Tilly Lawless, sex worker and writer, to confront the false divides between intimacy and commerce. Together in The Act, they excavate the space where professional touch meets professional movement—each a kind of construction, a knowing choreography.
Bodies become currency, become canvas, become both subject and object, become protest. The working body, the body that refuses to apologise for its labor, the exhausted body.Mish Grigor, a theatre director known for dismantling theatrical conventions and interrogating power, works through this dialectic: that both sex work and dance navigate the tension between self and service, between ideas of authenticity and choreography. The work features an original scorefrom composer and sound designer Daniel Jenatsch and lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis
The Act explores how both dancers and sex workers navigate the delicate balance between personal expression and professional service, between artistic integrity and market demands. The question isn’t whether we can separate the real from the performed—the question is why we insist on trying. The Act lives in this ambiguity, this blueness, this space where desire meets commerce meets art meets flesh.
