This new generation is finding its feet. And its voice. And its ideas. Move FM, the annual showcase from Future Makers, Dance Makers Collective's emerging artist company, returns to Sydney Fringe with five new works that collectively make a strong case for the health and ambition of contemporary dance in this city. Performed at New Theatre in Newtown, this year's program is confident, inventive, and at its best, genuinely exhilarating.
The program opens with Storming Wembley, choreographed and directed by Jemma Brittney-Evans, and it is an inspired point of entry. Football stadium culture, the pre-match swagger, the communal fervour, the drinking, the eventual eruption into something uglier, provides the frame, and the ensemble seizes it with tremendous energy. It is a genuinely original choreographic premise: sport as theatre, tribalism as movement. The physical storytelling is sharp, the group dynamic convincingly volatile, and the escalation from camaraderie to confrontation lands with real theatrical punch.
Competitor No. _, choreographed by Edie Burgess, shifts the register to something more inward. The work interrogates systems of judgement and comparison within dance culture itself, the way competitive environments shape young bodies and young minds. A large ensemble works around and with chairs in formations that suggest both discipline and constraint, with two performers eventually in direct conflict providing a compelling focal point. The lighting design here is exceptional, carving the stage into something that feels simultaneously exposed and cinematic. A solo sequence toward the close is among the finest individual moments of the evening.
It's About Time, a duet by Erika Barnier and Vida Rosauer, offers a more intimate investigation. The pair explore time's inconsistency, how it compresses and expands and sometimes seems to vanish altogether. What is striking here is the maturity on display. These are young performers working with an abstract concept and inhabiting it fully, moving apart and coming together with a physical synchronicity that feels earned rather than rehearsed. A quiet standout.
Cheers, choreographed by Kate Clerkin, builds its world around a pub gathering. There is a bar table and stools pressed into service as the social architecture of a familiar scene. Like Storming Wembley, it understands that dance rooted in recognisable human behaviour has immediate traction with an audience. The work begins and ends in the same place, a structural circularity that gives it a satisfying completeness. The use of props is excellent throughout, grounding the movement in the tactile reality of its setting.
The evening closes with Antics, choreographed by Zoe Jewell, and it is the piece that stays with you longest. A full company work drawing on the behaviour of ants, the collective impulse, the highly organised systems of movement, the tension between the individual and the swarm, it achieves something that mixed bills rarely manage in their final slot: genuine momentum. Bodies assembling, dispersing, reassembling in patterns that feel both instinctive and precisely calibrated. The choreography has a breathtaking sense of cumulative energy. This may be the strongest piece seen from Move FM in several years.
As a program, Move FM 2026 demonstrates what the Future Makers platform exists to produce: emerging artists who are not merely developing technique, but developing ideas. Several of these choreographers are ready for considerably larger stages.
Move FM Future Makers. Staged at New Theatre, 542 King Street, Newtown. Sydney Fringe Festival, 23–26 September 2026.
Tickets and more info: https://sydneyfringe.com/events/move-fm/
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