Amber Haines on RED and the Power of Contemporary Dance

Contemporary dance has a unique ability to communicate what words often cannot — using movement, physicality, and image to explore ideas that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant.

In RED, Dancenorth Australia places two performers inside a giant translucent dome as the air slowly disappears around them, creating a visually arresting framework for a work that examines connection, survival, and environmental pressure through the body itself. Described by the company as an allegory for a contracting world and the suffocation of biodiversity, the production blends athletic physical theatre with intimate human interaction, inviting audiences to interpret meaning through movement as much as narrative. Presented as part of the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale, curated and hosted by RISING, RED promises a bold exploration of humanity under pressure.

At the centre of the work is performer and collaborator Amber Haines, whose career spans dance, theatre, and interdisciplinary performance-making across Australia and internationally.

Amber believes the role of the artist in contemporary society is to guide people towards the notion of care. To illuminate other vantage points of worldly processes and what it means to be human with in a larger framework, an eco-system of life.

From this space, as the co-Artistic Director and company photographer for Dancenorth, Amber has co-directed the creation of 10 mainstage works over the past 11 years with her long-time collaborator and life partner, Kyle Page. Their critically acclaimed works have toured extensively across Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, France, and Mexico. These works have also been featured at major international arts festivals such as Sydney Festival, Brisbane Festival, Perth Festival, Adelaide Festival, Darwin Festival, MOFO, RISING, OzAsia Festival, Ten Days on the Island, WOMADelaide, and The Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris.

Amber, as a moving artist, encourages people to recognise that their bodies are intrinsically connected to something larger: that the intelligence of the soma is inherently wise and circulates information, stories and creative potential that are an unstable living process impossible to define by linearity or reductionism. Bypassing analytical processes, Amber invites non-judgmental embodiment as an expression of freedom, aliveness and recalibration.

What was the conceptual starting point for RED? What were you interrogating or exploring?

Amber: RED began with a curiosity about our relationship to the natural world and the perilous illusion that we are separate from it. We were exploring interdependence, relationality, fragility, and the consequences of disconnection.

How did you approach the choreography collaboratively – what does co-directing this work look like in practice?

Amber: The work emerges through ongoing dialogue between Kyle and I, the dancers, and the environment we’re creating. It’s a shared authorship where material is shaped in the room through listening, intuition and response. Kyle and I come from very different perspectives in the room and that is our greatest strength, we often acknowledge that if an idea makes it past both of our filters, then we know it is an idea worth pursuing! 

Red carries so much symbolic weight – blood, passion, warning, desire. What does it mean in this context?

Amber: In RED, the colour holds both an ode and a warning. It speaks to life, but also to what is at risk / something urgent, visceral and deeply connected to survival.

How does this work sit within or push against the contemporary dance landscape in Australia?

Amber: It leans into a more immersive, sensory experience — where audiences are invited into a shared space of vulnerability rather than being positioned as passive observers. It is a very arresting experience and asks a lot of the audience.

What are you asking of the dancers’ bodies in this piece, and how did that shape the choreographic choices?

Amber: We’re asking the dancers to exist in a state of heightened responsiveness, at once physically demanding, but also deeply attuned. The choreography emerges from that need to adapt and survive within a shifting environment.

For audiences unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe what they’re about to experience?

Amber: Something intimate and expansive all at once. A visceral encounter that you feel in the body, rather than something you need to interpret or resolve with the mind.

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RED plays at Southbank Theatre, Melbourne as part of RISING festival.

For tickets and more information, visit the RISING website.