Restore 2026 | STRUT Dance

Jul 15, 2025

7:00 pm

Central Gallery, PICA

In July 2026, STRUT Dance partnered with PICA to present Restore, a double bill bringing together two distinct approaches to choreography, sound and performance. The season featured the premiere of CALL, a new commission by Boorloo-based artist Ainslie Allan, alongside the West Australian premiere of Mickey by Naarm-based choreographer Brooke Stamp.

Presented in PICA’s Central Galleries, the works invited audiences into the live processes beneath performance. CALL brought movement into conversation with voice and sound, while Mickey drew on improvisation and memory to reveal the impulses, decisions and labour carried by the dancer in real time.

Restore was presented by STRUT Dance in association with PICA. The season was assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body; the Western Australian Government; and STRUT Movers, whose generous support helped make the program possible.

The works

Ainslie Allan – CALL

A series of atmospheric scores are versed in repeated call for feeling as a way to meet the destabilisation and rupture of our times. The work offers grieving-as-we-go as an emotional response-ability for living, listening and thriving amid personal and socio-political complexities. Grounded in combining the enduring performance improvisation practices of three artists, Ainslie Allan, Anika Moses & Jo Pollitt, CALL deliberately seeks tenderness and deep attending inside constant unsettlings. It proposes embodied dis-armouring as resilience, as a way of staying with the resonance of continuous aftermaths. Layered, looped, live-generated choreography, voice and writing-as-dancing return again and again to repair and restoration, not as resolution but as an active process that is ongoing and communal. Allan, Moses and Pollitt combine and expand edges of respective artistic forms to accentuate the body as an essential site for listening and healing. They perform together as integrated ensemble to generate an urgently warm call that ‘conjure(s) more than itself’ – LaBelle, 2014.

Brooke Stamp – Mickey

A wild trip through the psychic waste of a dancer. In this premiere work from Brooke Stamp, the hidden, subconscious impulses of a dancer rise and writhe. Stamp pries open the usually closed space of a rehearsal studio so we can witness the dancer at work. Spoken-word recordings of Stamp’s inner-world are amplified and warped through a feedback loop, provided by experimental composer Daniel Jenatsch, powering her movement. Her deep knowledge of dance is embodied, regurgitated and dislocated through psycho-physical release. Every performance of Mickey offers a new, ever-evolving experience. The creative process is alive and in real time. Her psyche balances the line. And the line is the labyrinth.

Meet the artists

Ainslie Allan

Brooke Stamp