What is it about the beginning that remains intoxicating? In her gripping solo "Rinse", the multidisciplinary artist and choreographer Amrita Hepi, whose roots lie in the Indigenous Bundjalung and Ngāpuhi territories (Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand), explores this question in a compelling way. Between the Big Bang and the planet’s approaching destruction she journeys through personal, cultural and colonial narratives about dance, the body and feminism – and deconstructs the myth of the new beginning. In collaboration with the British theatre-maker Mish Grigor, "Rinse" develops a fast-paced structure of movement, text and repetition that shows that nothing really begins anew – our stories, bodies and memories are saturated with the past. Both profound and comic, Hepi plays with the thrill of beginning – of a first love, first steps, the first lines of a novel – while asking the question: what will it take to have a future that does not suppress marginalised, repressed – Indigenous – knowledge, but takes it seriously? "Rinse" shifts between desire, rapture, popular culture and colonial history and exerts a powerful fascination all its own. A piece about beginnings, endings – and the period between them in which we live – by one of the most remarkable choreographers of our time.
