Amrita Hepi & Mish Grigor: RINSE

Created by Amrita Hepi with Mish Grigor, RINSE premiered in Australia in 2022, and has since toured extensively across Europe, the UK and Canada. I saw the piece in Lisbon, late September, at Teatro do Bairro Alto.

‘In the beginning there was…’ – these words will be announced at the beginning of the piece and repeated several times throughout Hepi’s 60-minute solo. Through them, the myth of origin is explored, a sacred theme often used as an angle in storytelling. 

The scenario is minimal: white floor and cyclorama, bio-fluorescent blue and white LED lights limiting the stage, four building-block structures representing an archipelago of islands in the Pacific; Hepi is dual-identity, with Bundjalung (Australia) and Ngāpuhi (New Zealand) heritage. Dressed in sky blue trousers and sneakers, with a white blouse and a microphone headpiece, Hepi resembles a pos(h)t-contemporary dancer-indigenous-cyborg. The piece is punctuated by Daniel Jenatsch’s experimental sound atmospheres.

Initially, by walking backwards as pulled by a tunnel of time, she starts the egg and chicken discourse, questioning the beginning of the world. ‘Emptiness is not to be confused with nothingness,’ she says. She then keeps moving throughout the space, at times rolling on the floor, hiding her face, at others jumping on top of the ‘islands’, using the mirror on one of them to speak towards it. In the beginning there were: ancestors, indigenous, humans (she cleverly spits a gummy bear from her mouth to indicate how microscopic we are), the cosmos, Greek gods, god, Adam, Eve, science, colonialism (a plastic gun is pointed upwards, bang!), the verb, art, feminism, holy dances, contemporary dances…

Language is more dense and exact than body movement, yet Hepi’s rolled eyes and protruding tongue in a Māori haka dance speak volumes about exotic objectification. Her body also enacts minimal units of Flashdance, Horton technique, Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Or of British royalty, when she waves like the Queen as if to her Commonwealth subjects. ‘The west is the beginning, the middle and the end of history’, ‘the louder story is remembered’ she repeats, before taking her blouse off.

In the beginning of the end of the piece there comes a para-fictional thread: we are asked to reach beneath our seats to find a party-popper, and pull it on the count of three. BANG! Confetti all over. We laugh out loud and relax, believing it’s the finale – failing to notice Hepi on the floor, fake blood on her neck and shoulders. As she rises to face us, I can’t help noticing that this is Hitchcockian suspense in reverse: she, not us, knew about the explosives beneath our seats, and we the ones she sprang the surprise upon, cast as colonial murderers. And still we laugh. 

Following the sound beats, Hepi takes an LED lamp, runs around the stage, repeating ‘forever a/end ever: modernism, colonialism, fascism’, landing with a softener, ‘it happens so much already!’

Hepi is ironic, and caricatures dance history and her own history – yet in building such a dense commentary on beginnings, western thought and endless repetition, she loses touch with both dance, and with us. ●