COMPANY
RESPONSES

Tylah Syme
In response to being a company member in the 2024 Major Work

(For Context, Tylah was unable to perform for one of the shows, however was able to watch instead)

To watch a work you are a part of is a surreal experience. Nobody understands this work better than me, but here I am sitting in the audience, experiencing every emotion I have ever felt in my life return all at once. Some bizarre consummation. I know exactly what is about to happen and I have no idea what is going on. Of course, I am emotional. Of course, I am impressed. Of course, I wish I was up there with them. In front of me are 18 young artists making a choice. In front of me are artists I want to listen to: my peers, my friends, my generation.

The world was set up so poorly for us. Ripped from the red velvet curtain that is the womb and spat into the rat race. I'm running, I'm running, I'm running, I'm dancing, I'm dancing, dancing won't make me money so I'm running and I'm lost and now I'm spinning and begging for someone to take the reins while simultaneously fighting for them back because they are doing a bit of a shitty job. Am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to have an opinion? Is my perspective allowed? Am I allowed?

When lights are on me, when the need for me to speak has finally arrived- could I express something objectively? Do I really have that capacity? With everything placed on my plate the second I wake up, to form a thought-out opinion is exhausting. To be lied to and consume and consume and consume is so easy. Watching videos of my friends as children hurts. Seeing myself as a child hurts. Making art hurts.

The human that is the dancer is performing in front of me and they are full of heart, full of heat. I feel the soul in the soulless moments separate from the body, mapping alone in a snowstorm, wishing for their warm vessel back. This storm is a wasteland of a day job. When the soul of a dancer is dying, just a little, and we tell it don’t worry we can like maybe try to do an open class like maybe next week if we have enough time and disposable income maybe?

It is said a dancer will die twice, I'm horrified to say I'll die a third. When I perform for the last time, when something kills me, and when I am eventually forgotten. I cannot leave a mark on this world, it will not let me- my chosen art form too fickle, too saturated, too much, too much, too much. But I am alive! I am born to live in the absurd! Lack of listening, watching, supporting, funding, and caring, I'm scared will make my first death so soon.

This work is decadent in the literal sense- it is decaying from the inside out, the decline is a ride I oddly wish to be on and we simply do not have time for prosperity until people listen.

To give young artists a voice is to give them hope. Before me now is the only exception. If it was not for Yellowwheel, I worry about what this year would become for me. To see my friends, my mentors, and my work is rare. I know everyone by name, I know their fears and share them. I want to celebrate them and thank them for everything. So yes, a reflection on this work by me will be biased and personal but I am allowed to have that opinion. I will stand by my subjective perspective of this work and hold it dearly for it is the only one that exists. It exists! It exists! It exists!

Reuben Macdougall Di Manno
In response to being a part of the 2022/2023 companies

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”

My instinct is to write about all the things that I find easeful about Yellow Wheel: check-ins, warm-ups, asking questions, being unsure, classes, schools of fish… But perhaps what keeps me coming back is the hard stuff: early Sunday mornings, arguments, a place for all the hard feelings: that is to say, check-ins, warmups, asking questions, being unsure, classes, schools of fish…

Yellow Wheel makes me a better dancer (more on this later, perhaps), but it also makes me a better person. Or at least, it makes me want to be a better person. Every time I feel like I have taken too much of the space, I treasure the fact that people are still listening. Every time I insist on the wrong movement in a phrase, I’m glad that someone is there to prove me wrong. Every time I think I have reached something close to my potential, someone is there to amaze me.

Earlier this year, I was watching two of the company members dance their duo from the work. I sat in silence and had the thought ‘I get to spend the next two months in awe’.

But we’re also a dance company! If I think about the dancer I was 2 years ago… well, I start disparaging that person. But he was still cool and a great dancer, just missing some of the skills I have now. Like

- Falling through the feet
- Tripping on Swanston Street
- Active listening through the point of contact
- Making funny choreography
- Being good at being bad. That one took a lot of work. Still does.
- Anchoring from the ribs or thigh or collarbone
- Being upside down
- Mentoring, just a little
- A million other things. For each paragraph, I’m feeling like a million things are unsaid. I feel I’m not doing it justice. ‘It’ being, I dunno, the work we do.

Because it is work. Hard work, often. But work that feels worthwhile. ‘Worth’ little money, perhaps, but worthy. Worthy of the time we give it and worthy of exhausting our bodies (safely) and worthy despite everyone who says “oh, dance! Is there much work in that?” Worthy as - dare I say it at the risk of disparaging all those who do the work of real resistance? - as an act of resistance.

Yellow Wheel feels like the Room of Requirement. I don’t know if it can be all things to all people, but it has manifested as many things for me. A space to explore masculinities (plural), a place to learn new tricks, a place to learn from peers - indeed, a place to find peers when I felt I had very few. A place to disagree (of which there are many) without venom (of which there are terrifyingly few). Or if group mentality manifests in a task or conversation, to be immediately free to examine and dismantle it - the company then reforming like some primordial hive of bees into a new formation.

And I have heard from others that Yellow Wheel can morph into yet more roles outside my experience. It has been a safe space for queer youth, the first place someone smiled while dancing, a refuge during lockdown.

Forgive me for quoting at length in what is already a self-indulgent reflection:

“You know what’s interesting about stillness and duration and meditation? In ‘real life’ it’s impossible for me to have any of this. The older I get the more activity and the more obligations I have. The pace is so fast. I’m literally running after myself. So I need to create these islands of time. Then I go through this transformation in the work; work transforms me, and then I use this experience in ‘real life’. Normally it’s the other way round: you do something, then you use it for your performance. My work is basically a learning experience.”
— Marina Abramović

Yellow Wheel is an island of time - the primary, non-negotiable pillar of my week - but it’s more than that. Insofar as possible, it is an island away from prejudice, from capitalism, from hate (even using that word in this context feels alien - I cannot imagine a situation in which hatred could arise). While at the same time, not ignoring those phenomena if someone needs to process them. “Work [read: YW] transforms me, and then I use this experience in ‘real life’”.

There is much more I wanted to say. I have memories to share, reflections on how far we have come, our capacity to change the company and our choreography and our mindsets without losing whatever it is that makes us… us. But I am almost at the front door, where I have promised myself to stop writing.

The wonderful, amazing, lucky thing is that this is not a reflection and goodbye; for whatever mysterious reason that will (I trust) be revealed in good time, it is a reflection marking a moment in time. I get to come back on Sunday and see everyone. And dance!

No right or wrong. Nothing matters. Everything is subjective. Floating rock.

Yellow Wheel extends the range of my human experience - it is at WXYZ or wherever we are with the company that I feel the greatest joys and sadnesses and laughter and fear. I know that if I feel frustrated or inarticulate or clumsy today, that there will be a day - soon - that I come to YW and feel masterful or composed or beautiful.