Time doesn’t unfold in a straight line in Two Blood. It coils in a circle of ash. The opening moments place two dancers in an embrace, surrounded by a smouldering ring that draws as much from Tagalaka and Chinese ancestry as it does from volcanic echoes and forensic memory.
Inspired by the story of entwined skeletons from different worlds discovered locked in an embrace, a Pompeii-Romeo and Juliet hybrid, the show begins at the ending, or rather, where the circle closes and begins again.
Two Blood is co-created by Australian Dance Theatre’s Artistic Director Daniel Riley and Tagalaka and Chinese story adviser Jasmin Sheppard. It explores migration, love, disruption, memory, and ancestry through intersecting stories danced and spoken across a shifting sound and visual terrain.
Karra Nam delivers the emotional spine of the work, embodying a young First Nations woman searching for how to maintain connection to Country. Her text, voice and movement link memory to land, and her performance elevates the written material with grace and power.
Zachary Lopez dances the story of a Chinese migrant, blending shifting identity with coded, restrained movement. His trajectory is one of soft assimilation and uneasy camouflage; a story of always arriving, never quite arrived.
A third thread, featuring Yilin Kong and based on her family’s migration via fossil-fuel-powered Indonesia and Singapore, feels more abstracted and unresolved.
The love story takes time to emerge. When it does, in a duet between Nam and Lopez, it’s intimate and relieved of the show’s heavier visual and sonic weight. The two turn away the TV screens that have been wheeled around the stage throughout the performance.
The score, previously skull-rattling, softens. And for a moment, they are just bodies meeting, moving, touching. It’s a striking moment of peace, made more powerful by the storm that precedes it.
The industrial soundscape, composed by James Howard and Andy Qilong Chia (of SAtheCollective), is often louder than most rock festivals. It blares and clatters, not just as texture but as confrontation.
It’s possible it’s meant to hurt; a sonic metaphor for colonial violence, fragmentation, or simply for modernity pressing in. That said, it’s worth asking whether that volume is necessary to carry the emotional or political weight intended.
Visual elements are smartly composed. The circle of ash, which the dancers mark, break and blur with their steps, becomes a living symbol of time, rupture and ritual.
The video screens that divide and rearrange the space show night skies, burning trees, housing blocks in Singapore. They anchor each “chapter” of the work, though they occasionally over-direct the viewer’s gaze, breaking immersion.
Riley has used live or visible musicians before (as in A Quiet Language at Adelaide Festival) and does so again here: Chia appears on screen making music live. While conceptually interesting, it also momentarily drags us out of the emotional world being built on stage.
One particularly elegant sequence features Lopez with dancers Zoe Wozniak and Patrick O’Luanaigh, echoing themes of assimilation and cultural performance. All three shift between tight unison and frayed edges, moving like a language being lost and learned at the same time.
The lighting design by Matthew Adey deserves special credit, especially in the opening image, which evokes something close to a Pink Floyd album cover; stark, mythic, and precise.
But for a piece inspired by love, not much of the runtime is spent within it. Two Blood is mostly about the conditions around love; what it costs to find, what culture asks you to abandon to keep it. Maybe that’s the point: that love, when it does arrive, is relief. It requires space. It asks us to listen, not just to feel.
This is an ambitious, politically complex, and emotionally rigorous work from Riley and Sheppard; sometimes overloaded, sometimes astonishing. It doesn’t tie things up neatly, but neither does history. Two Blood breaks the circle to make a new one.
Two Blood runs to 1 November at the Odeon Theatre as part of 2025 OzAsia Festival. 57a Queen Street Norwood SA 5067.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://www.adt.org.au/our-work/two-blood
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/ausdancetheatre/
Photo credits: Morgan Sette
