Restore
25–28 June, 2025
7pm, 90 minutes (20 minute interval)
PICA and STRUT Dance present Restore, a dynamic double bill of new and recent dance works highlighting innovation and cross-regional collaboration. Restore facilitates deeper personal and creative connections across the region, fostering a spirit of exchange and collaboration. In 2025, Restore features a new choreographic commission from Western-Australian choreographer Adelina Larsson Mendoza and the West Australian premiere of CUDDLE by Melbourne- based Harrison Ritchie-Jones.
Artist Talk with Adelina Larsson Mendoza
Friday 27 June 2025, 5:30pm
Free to attend
RSVP here
Fresh from her durational solo last summer at The Watermill Center in Long Island, New York, Larsson Mendoza offers a once-only, intimate Artist Talk that reflects on her significant body of work. Audiences are invited to explore the highlights of her recent Min Folkdans archival project through a series of anecdotes, objects and choreographic reflections which form the background to her Restore commission Bell.
CUDDLE
In CUDDLE, two of Melbourne’s contemporary dance artists on the rise, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheff, engage in a difficult and dynamic duel filled with surreal sonic and visual surprises. Weaving contemporary dance with elements from martial arts, figure skating, rodeo barnyard dance and a host of more abstract inspirations, CUDDLE ebbs and flows from the joyful and absurd to the inventive and technically brilliant.
Age recommendation: 15+
Content warnings: Strobe lighting, nudity, dynamic audiovisual effects
Creator/Performer: Harrison Ritchie-Jones
Performer: Michaela Tancheff
Producer: Michaela Coventry
Composers: Nick Roder, Max Dowling
Cinematographer: Babi Bertoldi
Lighting Designer: Ashley Buchanan
Production Manager: Mark Haslam
Bell
Bell is a new solo and the latest instalment in Min Folkdans, an ongoing archival research project and choreographic collection by Wooditjup-based dance artist Adelina Larsson Mendoza.
Drawing from Larsson Mendoza’s Swedish-Mexican family history, Min Folkdans unfolds as a years-long personal, political, and historical meditation on migration, national formations and the sensory body.
This special performance of Bell also invites audiences into Larsson Mendoza’s intimate dialogue with Swedish dancemaker Per Jonsson, who performed an improvised solo and staged ‘Schakt’ for three dancers at PICA in 1993 with the Chrissie Parrott Company.
Following on from her durational solo last summer at The Watermill Center, Long Island, NY, in collaboration with acclaimed director Robert Wilson, Bell is arguably Larsson-Mendoza at the height of her powers.
Learn more about Min Folkdans archival project, here.
Choreographer/Performer: Adelina Larsson Mendoza
Dramaturg: Anthony Coxeter
Composer: Sia Ahmad
Lighting and Technical Designer: Mark Haslam
Costume Designer: Kate Tadé
Artist Biographies
CUDDLE
Harrison Ritchie-Jones is an independent dancer, choreographer and filmmaker based in Naarm/Melbourne. His choreographic practice celebrates dance and is fuelled by a curiosity in techniques from a range of physical practices. Upskilling and blending forms, he uses dance to carve out spaces for absurdity, humour and physical virtuosity to work together in surreal and expressive explorations of storytelling.
Michaela Tancheff is a Naarm/Melbourne based dancer. She works closely with Harrison Ritchie-Jones and has performed in his works ‘TANTRUM for 6’ and ‘CUDDLE’. She performed in ‘Token Armies’ and toured internationally performing ‘4/4’ by Chunky Move. Michaela graduated from Transit Dance in 2018.
Bell
Adelina Larsson Mendoza is an award-winning choreographer living in Wardandi Boodja in Wooditjup Margaret River. Her choreographic work has followed an interest in the body as archive, body as place and dance as an ephemeral practice. Her choreographic series In the Rite and Min Folkdans attempt to explore stories, motifs and myths from her dual Mexican and Swedish cultural histories. As a diasporic dancer, absence is also persistently present in her process and works. She is interested in capturing or animating ephemerality, choreographing materials and the inanimate, and creating installations and sculptures.
Sia Ahmad holds a rich and extensive background in Australian music, creating idiosyncratic sounds over the last decade and more. Using guitar, keyboard, voice and electronics, she works both as singer/composer and improviser, when performing as Shoeb Ahmad, as well as collaborative projects. Once of acclaimed electronic jazz outfit Tangents and an APRA AMCOS Art Music Award winner, Sia has performed and released a diverse range of original music throughout Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Europe and South Eastern Asia while also working on sound design for dance/theatre (including the Australian Dance Award winning ‘Wonder Woman’, performed by Laura Boynes), installation pieces and contemporary chamber composition.
STRUT Dance
Co-Directors: James O’Hara & Sofie Burgoyne
General Manager: Deborah Robertson
Communications Manager: Cameron Park
Finance Officer: Sherry Quiambao
Restore Production Manager: Mark Haslam
Restore Stage Manager: Rhianne Coffey
About STRUT Dance
Based in Boorloo (Perth), STRUT Dance is a choreographic centre that supports a thriving community of dance artists and connects them with audiences through bold, contemporary programming.
If you’d like to support the 2026 iteration of Restore, or get to know more about what STRUT does, please contact STRUT co-directors at director@strutdance.org.au.
Acknowledgements
Restore is presented by STRUT Dance, in association with PICA, and has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, the State of Western Australia through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries and STRUT movers, STRUT’s generous donor circle.
Images: Prue Stent; Chloé Bellemère
