Alice Dixon
Reviews and Testimonials
“The performance is close to ninety minutes long, a fully realised dance work that includes nine performers. Lady Example is a bewildering bricolage of behaviours and performances, knitted together with total assurance. You feel that it ought to crumble beneath the weight of its own spiralling aspirations. Instead, I found myself enthralled by a precision of judgement and execution that draws together this unclassifiable work into a fascinating unity.”
Alison Croggon for Witness Performance
https://witnessperformance.com/next-wave-lady-example-turning-the-gaze-back/
“Lady Example is a small miracle: a phenomenal show that works even though, by all means, it should collapse under its own towering ambitions.”
Jana Perkovic for The Sydney Morning Herald
“Delivered with deadpan assurance, the staccato chit-chat (to the audience) of Meaden and McBride, as the underwhelmed beige pairing, encapsulated all that it is to be human…. All three were characterised by a mordant humour and a humanist ethos encased within a fumbling banality, and it was refreshing to see a performance in which the expressions of the face were given equal weight to the expressions of the body.”
Gracia Haby for Fjord Review on This is What’s Happening
http://www.fjordreview.com/beloved be/
“If you’re a human with feelings then you should see this show. It’s its own wondrous thing and does stuff all its own and it’s funny and striking and strange and poignant and completely mesmerising...I was at times delighted, thrilled, confounded and moved by this work. I came away inspired by the rich example Lady Example provides that there are yet new forms of performance to be made and discovered. Alice Will Caroline is a company leading the way with their adventurous take on what it is to encounter bodies in space and each other in the world.”
Emilie Collyer
Playwrite
“Rarely do we see works that display such sensitivity and sophistication in their execution, and such character and personality in the performances. This work was honed by artists with a unique vision - the work displaying a confidence to tread its own path unencumbered by the trappings of unfortunate current trends in dance. This is What's Happening is an enigmatic work by a captivating ensemble, that needs to be seen.”
Antony Hamilton on This Is What’s Happening
“Detail detail detail. It’s the detail which fascinates. Consider the subtle emphasis given to the different ways in which the three bodies communicate. Two dancers and a performance maker. A bit different. A bit similar. Detail detail detail…. Full of this kind of hushed, understated theatricality. It constantly shapes toward narrative, but never settles into a storytelling. It slips laterally through its many diverse parts – episodes, sketches, extended passages. What is consistent is the atmosphere of unease, albeit unease with a slyly comic inflection.”
Andrew Fuhrman on This is What’s Happening
https://neandellus.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/slown-smallened-son-this-is-whats-happening/
“I saw your show on Thursday night. I loved it! It was so great to see so many performers on stage. It made me think how intimacy has been co-opted by the arts as a way to excuse its inability to fund big ideas. Your show was not ‘intimate' at all, thank you! It was big and stupid and funny and clever and annoying and outrageous and smart. Best kind of art!”
David Pledger on Lady Example
Private email
“It is beautifully idiosyncratic and seemed to arise from a strange and authentic place. The combination of skill and the authenticity of movement style was exceptional, and rarely have I seen text so beautifully realised in a dance piece.”
Clair Korobacz (one step at a time like this) on This is What’s Happening
“They tell their tales with a wink that seeks to make colluders of the audience…. McBride, as did Meaden and Dixon in their earlier solos, crosses the line between stage and audience, with warmth and humour…. From “part-storytime, part-awkward lap dance, part hypnotism, part-requiem,” all three solos reveal their earnest take on life.”
Gracia Haby for Fjord Review on Blowin’ Up
http://www.fjordreview.com/blowin-up-melbourne fringe-festival/
Blowin’ Up was mentioned in Fjord Review’s ‘Best of 2016’
https://www.fjordreview.com/swing time/
“The work of Slown, Smallened, and Son (now working under Alice Will Caroline)--Lady Example in particular---is an entirely new genre of performance. Not quite theatre, not quite dance, not quite dance-theatre, I have seen many dance works attempt to unite text and movement, but never with the success, boldness, and skill of Slown, Smallened and Son. Lady Example for me, as an audience member, was simultaneously small and epic. A series of strange occurrences that, when sewn together (with great skill), felt both confusing and familiar (and isn't confusing and familiar the state we all perpetually exist in?). Stylistically the work is very current, it is the next thing, sitting in a place beyond irony, a grey area, perhaps it fits within the meta-modernist movement.”
Morgan Rose
Theatre Director