{"id":84923,"date":"2026-09-01T09:31:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T09:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/84923\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T09:31:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T09:31:11","slug":"step-into-your-shadow-with-night-moves-metro-arts-and-brisbane-festival-explore-the-dark-side-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/84923\/","title":{"rendered":"Step into your shadow with Night Moves: Metro Arts and Brisbane Festival explore the dark side"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MikhailBy day, Brisbane Festival<\/a> fills the city with spectacle. After dark, Metro Arts<\/a> invites audiences to experience Night Moves \u2013 a season of performance, exhibition and celebration that embraces the intimate, the curious, and even the disturbing.<\/p>\n

Across four works spanning contemporary dance, visual art and queer nightlife, audiences are invited to step into spaces where familiar boundaries begin to dissolve and new ways of seeing, feeling and connecting emerge.<\/p>\n

\u201cNight doesn\u2019t just change the city; it changes us,\u201d says Metro Arts CEO Kieran Swann. \u201cMetro Arts offers something a little darker, a little stranger, and a little riskier. It\u2019s an invitation to step beyond the familiar and discover artists that aren\u2019t interested in easy answers. They\u2019re creating experiences that ask us to lean into uncertainty and discover what new ideas might be waiting there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shandy<\/a> sees Metro Arts transform into an \u00a0immersive, queer fantasia. DJ Sweaty Baby\u2019s much-loved Brisbane club night\u00a0 invites you to stay out later than you planned. When the lights drop and the pulse kicks in, Shandy brings Metro Arts alive with the kind of sweaty, euphoric chaos that only a proper queer dancefloor can deliver. Through live performance and DJs, \u00a0Shandy offers you a night that\u2019s darker, sweatier, and just a little bit risky.<\/p>\n

At the heart of Night Moves is The Scramble<\/a>, Shaun Johnston\u2019s award-winning work that combines contemporary dance and wrestling. In a rough-and-tumble athletic match, two performers wrestle with masculinity and the boundaries, physicality, and connection that exist within male friendships. Slipping from friend to foe to friend again, they gradually reveal something tender and complex about the ways men connect through touch.<\/p>\n

\"MetroNight Moves\u2019 exhibitions invite audiences to question the boundaries of perception and self. (In)Sight<\/a> by Kuweni Dias Mendis and Grant x Wilkes explores image making across digital and handmade forms, inviting audiences to see and be seen.<\/p>\n

Building on their award-winning collaboration (Metro Arts Experimental Portraiture Prize, 2025 Brisbane Portrait Prize), this exhibition extends this collaboration into a third dimension of experimentation with ritual, darkness and the unstable nature of images.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Choral Cthonics<\/a>, gathers local and international artists to explore the voice as instrument, threshold, collective technology and self-annihilation. In Choral Cthonics, the mouth and body act as conduits for forces that are communal, elemental and unstable: drawing audiences toward new connections with each other and with the more-than-human world.<\/p>\n

Together, these works form Night Moves: bringing a different beat to Brisbane Festival. Whether on the dancefloor, in the gallery, or at the edge of a wrestling mat, Metro Arts invites audiences to embrace the unfamiliar \u2013 and discover something new about themselves along the way.<\/p>\n

The Brisbane Festival<\/a> runs 4 \u2013 26 September 2026. For more information about Metro Arts: Night Moves, visit: www.metroarts.com.au<\/a>\u00a0for details.<\/p>\n

Images: Mikhail Karikis, No ordinary protest (production photo) | The Scramble \u2013 photo by Andrea Mae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By day, Brisbane Festival fills the city with spectacle. After dark, Metro Arts invites audiences to experience Night…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1174,1164,99,1168,1172,1165,1175,260,1163,1171,1169,1170,1173,1166,1177,1167,1162,1176],"class_list":["post-84923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brisbane","tag-belvoir","tag-book-of-mormom","tag-brisbane","tag-destination-nsw","tag-fortyfivedownstairs","tag-kooza","tag-la-boite-theatre","tag-melbourne","tag-meow-meow","tag-midsumma","tag-muck-rack","tag-ngv","tag-opera-australia","tag-publication-media","tag-rocky-horror","tag-the-lion-king","tag-theatre","tag-todd-mckenney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}