Public Energy Performing Arts is kicking off the new year with an Indigenous dance performance that’s all about the romance of beginnings.
Coming to Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in downtown Peterborough for one night only on Wednesday, January 28, Rinse by Amrita Hepi explores what happens when the surge of the thrill from a new beginning starts to fade.
“Why is it when something is about to end, we begin to want to save it?” Hepi asks in a promotional video for the show. “Is there the possibility of a fresh start or are we constantly cycling through these patterns of inertia again and again?”
Based in Naarm (Melbourne) and Bangkok, Hepi is an award-winning Indigenous (Bunjulung/Ngapuhi) dancer and choreographer. She has been named a Forbes 30 Under 30 artist and has twice been the winner of the people’s choice award for the Keir Choreographic Award. Trained at Australia’s leading performing arts training organization and at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre in New York, she is a member of performance company APHIDS, on the board of directors and artistic associate for the RISING city-wide arts festival, and a part of the Artistic Associate group for STRUT Dance.
In creating Rinse, Hepi was supported by Mish Grigor, a fellow multidisciplinary artist who is the director of APHIDS, one-third of the collaborative performance group POST, and a performer and curator who has appeared at the Sydney Opera House.
The two acclaimed artists created Rinse as a solo dance and theatre work based on an improvisational score that is both witty and politically and culturally aware.
VIDEO: “Rinse” by Amrita Hepi and Mish Grigor
Through movement and striking dance, Rinse explores the intoxication of beginnings using playful satire, evocative monologue, and personal narratives in relation to dance, art, feminism, desire, love, popular culture, and colonial history. Hepi argues that all events, relationships, moments, and environments exist as continuums to which people constantly contribute.
“Text and movement constantly complement each other, the body picking up where the text leaves off, the text responding to the body’s impulses,” said Hepi in an interview for the Festival D’Avignon where, in 2025, Rinse was the first Australian work performed at the festival.
“Rinse tells the story of a new beginning, a series of starts that echo each other. The performance explores a non-linear relationship with time, based on cycles.”
In the interview, Hepi explained that she tried to reflect the “multiplicity of influences” of her duel Indigenous identity and the influence of colonial culture.
“Rinse is a blend of traditional dances, including the Maori Haka, and of the teaching of Martha Graham and postmodernism, which stem from a long lineage of Western thought and research on dance,” she said. “I see dance as a way to approach language, to teach and question it.”
The production is set to a minimalist blue and white set design where, Hepi said, “shape and function shift according to the imagination.”
“The space might begin as a reflective surface telling a story of falling in and out of love, before transforming into an archipelago of islands where I find refuge,” Hepi said.
“I wanted the scenography to be easily adaptable, that would almost give the impression of expanding as the show unfolds. But I also wanted it to remain simple, because the text and movement already carry a wealth of information.”
Hepi created Rinse, her first performance conceived as a choreographer, in 2020 for a competition for the Keir Choreographic Award, originally intended as a short piece. Rinse premiered at Performance Space in Everleigh, Australia in 2022 by Carriageworks and has since been presented on stages and at festivals in Australia, the U.S., France, Turkey, the U.K., Germany, Ireland, and Canada.
The 50-minute show at Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in downtown Peterborough will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 28.
General admission tickets are available on a sliding scale pricing between $10 and $50, with a recommended price of $30, at markethall.org
For more information about Public Energy’s 2025-26 season, visit publicenergy.ca.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a long-time media sponsor of Public Energy Performing Arts.
