Earlier this year, Phaedra Brown and Nasim Patel joined us for the Experimental Choreographic Lab and shared work-in-progress with our audiences. Now, those same works are having their world-premieres as a part of Sydney Fringe 2026.
We sat down with Phaedra and Nasim to check in on their projects six months post-ECP Lab and get special insights into what audiences can expect at Fringe this September.
Tell us about the work you're taking to Sydney Fringe 2026?
Phaedra Brown: FLOP is a work that started out about failure and has become about the thing that happens after failure – trying again and again, and finding the humour in falling on your face. It places devastation and compassion next to each other in vignettes of flops, slip-ups, stumbles, and everyday tribulations. It explores the labour, physical and psychological, of living one day to the next, and the expectation to stay composed under pressure. What does resilience look like in the body, and in the femme body, and in the performing body?
Nasim Patel: Tell Distance is an experimental dance work that intersects choreography, theatre, and projection. It sees two performers talking and moving in unison with their digitally projected doubles as they jump-cut, glitch, and loop through road trip stories of being lost in unfamiliar landscapes. Virtuosic and at times sinister, Tell Distance warps space and time in an attempt to crack open what we assume is beyond the horizon. Tell Distance is inspired by my 2025 Honours research into how colonial narratives are constructed and maintained. It features an experimental approach to movement and storytelling, using principles of video editing as its primary choreographic device. I'm grateful that the work has found a great home, being presented at the experimental hub for Sydney Fringe, TheLab@UNSW.
How was PSpace and the Experimental Choreographic Program a part of the journey of this work?
PB: I was lucky enough to develop this project through Performance Space’s Experimental Choreographic Lab, which provided a much-needed opportunity to share the beginnings of this work with mentor Martin del Amo and a cohort of other amazing artists. I was able to get feedback and advice, and perform a ten minute in-progress version of the work. The structure of this program really helped me to not only get into the nuts and bolts of what I wanted from the project, but also dream into the possibility of a performance outcome, and what FLOP the show might look like!
NP: A seed for Tell Distance came from I remember what the machine remembers what I remember, a work I made in collaboration with TIAN Zi-Ping, Roslyn Orlando, and LEE Ming-Chieh which was presented in Liveworks last year. One consideration of that work was to investigate how the perceived authority and power of screen and performance spaces can be subverted and undermined, which is a through line I've followed in Tell Distance.
This year, the Experimental Choreographic Program was an exciting opportunity to crack open the predominant structure of Tell Distance that I was working with in the months prior. I was able to develop new implementations of choreographic devices and collaborate with the other lab participants to figure out how the work can best organise and direct the attention of the audience. It's important to undertake particular research when choreographing with experimental modes and I've been honoured to have PSpace support that kind of development.
What can audiences who saw your work in progress at the ECP Showing expect from these new iterations?
PB: More chaos! More fun dancing! And the same amount of bad singing…
NP: Audiences can expect complex and satisfying choreographic patterns on a far larger scale than the ECP showing. On a basic level, there'll be twice the amount of performers! Creatively, every choreographic idea has been expanded and animated, making the work more hypnotic and funny than ever.
If you had to describe Tell Distance and FLOP in just three words, what would they be?
PB: Falling, Flailing & Loving it.
NP: Live, Glitch, Myth.
