Forged across 52 years by the geographic and cultural isolation of its base in Townsville, Queensland, contemporary dance company Dancenorth is a masterclass on the imperative of connecting with an audience. It takes a tailored creativity for the arts to cut through in this remote regional industrial and army centre, where the North Queensland Cowboys are the pride of the city, but since spouses Kyle Page and Amber Haines took the reins in 2014, the company has explored cerebral themes with a sensorial immediacy that brings the often esoteric genre of contemporary dance to the people.
Their latest production for this year’s Brisbane festival, Wayfinder, is no exception: an antidote to the recent gloom as we try to find our way forward – or, as Page describes it, “a tonic for our times”.
