CHOREOGRAPHIC COLLAGE

DANCE

13 May

Recently landed: Choreographic Collage

Gracia’s written response to Oliver Savariego’s Slapdash (work-in-progress), especially for Fjord Review.

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Oliver Savariego presents a collage of parts still moving, and perhaps ever destined to always be so, in a new solo work-in-progress, Slapdash, at the conclusion of his Front Studio Residency at Temperance Hall. A one-night-only revelation, Savariego’s Slapdash self-portrait plays with sequence and the layering of personal meaning, in what he describes as “a choreographic collage of stolen materials, corrupted through recollection, iteration, translation and digitisation.”[i]

Serving as quite the allurement, Slapdash, in its current form, is billed as featuring works “stolen” from a long list of artists, some of whom are seated in the audience, others further afield or from the history books. Angela Goh, Antony Hamilton, Atlanta Eke, Babette Mangolte, Boris Charmatz, Deanne Butterworth, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Isadora Duncan, Jo Lloyd, Justin Bieber, Kylie Minogue, Loie Fuller, Lucy Guerin, Melanie Lane, Michel Gondry, Nana Bilus Abaffy, Phillip Adams, Pina Bausch, Rafael Bonachela, Rebecca Jensen, Sandra Parker, Shelley Lasica, Trisha Brown, William Forsythe, Yvonne Rainer and more besides. The roll call, varied and impressive, leads me to look for the artists’ hallmarks. Will they be clearly signposted or more abstract? And given that this collage is embedded in the personal: does it matter if I miss them in the rip and slip-slide of the process?

[i] Oliver Savariego, Slapdash, Temperance Hall website, https://www.temperancehall.com.au/events/slapdash-oliver-savariego, accessed 2nd May, 2026.