From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Leather and Breath: A Durational Dance Work on Recurring Embrace
This article concerns a 2018 contemporary dance work created in collaboration with Indigenous artists. For other dance adaptations, see Dance and Beach Surgery. For works on leather armour and erotics, see The Catch That Answers Every Fall (Choreographic Work, 2022) and The Leather That Remembers.
Leather and Breath is a 75-minute durational dance work choreographed by Beau Ng and developed collaboratively with Bangarra Dance Theatre, exploring the recurring intimacy of Leif and Katita as sustained, non-narrative investigation of protection, vulnerability, and recurrence.
The work abandons plot for sustained physical states: two dancers moving in and out of contact, the space between them animated as character itself. Central is Katita's leather armour—here sculptural, wearable pieces that dancers negotiate, don, remove, and exchange. The leather becomes a site for exploring erotic consent and care—touch that protects, restrains, permits, and refuses simultaneously.
Ng's choreography draws from movement vocabularies worked through cultural protocol with Bangarra's advisors, grounding movement in specific relationships to country (NSW interior, red earth, Hunter Valley) rather than treating Indigenous forms as ornament. A key sequence stages the dancers moving through a floor of red dust, leaving traces continuously swept away—an engagement with cyclicality, threshold, and the desire to break the cycle.
The Brisbane premiere generated critical attention for refusing to resolve the Leif and Katita relationship into triumph or tragedy; recurrence itself becomes durable aesthetic and erotic form. Reception has been mixed: some praise the careful staging of surgical intimacy and care; others question whether the collaboration protocol adequately centred Indigenous authorship, raising ongoing questions about adaptation, protocol, and creative ownership.[1]
See also
- The Catch That Answers Every Fall (Choreographic Work, 2022)
- Dance and Beach Surgery
- The Leather That Remembers: Craft, Care, and the Erotics of Recurrence in Beach Surgery Adaptation
- The Surgery as Caress: Staging Touch and Transgression in Beach Surgery's Visual Culture
References
- ↑ Ng, B. "Notes on Making Leather and Breath." Contemporary Dance Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 4, 2019.