Biennale College Choreographers – Liminal / The garden

This year, two early-career choreographers, selected from 63 international applicants, have been exploring, questioning and developing their dance practice in depth, mentored by Wayne McGregor. As part of their bespoke programme, each artist has been given intensive time and space for choreographic and conceptual development through the making and sharing of a new work for and with our Biennale College dancers – see their creations in the Arsenale! As a career forward pathway, the programme has also provided tutoring on the “business of choreography” – arming our artists with the foundational livelihood skills to compose and execute their real-world working portfolio.

The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, which means “threshold”.
A liminal space is a doorway, a place of transition.
This is the sacred space where old and familiar structures can fall apart, and there is a world ahead of us that we cannot yet see.
It is neither here nor there, it is often a period of discomfort, the middle time of transformation.
We are thrown between where we have come from and where we are going.
These thresholds of not knowing our “next” are inevitable and can be disruptive.
But it is also a place for potential. We are required to hang in here.
We are suspended here. But in this the time of waiting – we become.

Here is freedom confined within the walls of the garden, a youthfulness to which one clings with all one’s might, faux bucolic as on the set of a photographic studio or the master painters of the 1500s.

The Garden is an inner world, made up of stories, emotions, thoughts...