Toil by Sheena McGrandles, premiering at HAU2 from 3–6 December, presents dance as physical training and disciplined repetition—a dancer’s prosaic mode of work.
Toil is mainly made of steps. Footwork from different traditions of dance training: Cunningham foot articulations, tendus, bun kicks, ball changes, chassés. Repetitions, as practised in class, accumulate over time to build a dancer.
The cast comprises five freelance dancers, each with years of experience working in various modalities beyond formal stepwork. Their postmodern and contemporary virtuosities have involved unlearning the mechanisms of control embedded in the classical and modern techniques that compose Toil.
Minor sections address this historical shift: sonic beats fade in dominance, and the dancers slow their movement. Their performativities begin to resemble the 2000s turn toward somatics, producing state-based affect. Body weight drops—through space, and from one body into another; geometric shapes dissolve.
Yet it’s the footwork patterns, presented frontally as if the audience is a studio mirror, that Toil centres. Live drumming by Steve Heather, accompanied by Marta Forsberg on violin and electronics, provides explicit scaffolding for the dancers’ feet to land on, in line with traditions that inform the movement vocabulary. Time is defined like how clocks control lives. We submit to the meter. The dancers abide by the metronome’s dynamic government, keeping up together, no dropping out. Endorphins from their shared workout hit, and joy, produced by adherence to procedure, becomes visible. As choreographer Susan Rethorst writes in her 2012 essay on the dailiness of practice, “Pleasure and rigour are not mutually exclusive”.
Toil associates this ‘rigour’ with labour. The costumes connote ‘work’, drawing on tradeswear: shorts and shirts, large pockets. Yet neither ‘work’ nor ‘rigour’ (quality of work), in and beyond this show, need be reduced to the recognisable traditions that Toil gives us without question, negotiation, or abstraction, even if they include joy. How and why we do labour (or labour does us) is what generates the function and meaning of (a) work, or lack thereof.
The dancers sometimes smile and nod at each other or at a friend in the audience. These are dancers with histories, individuals gathering as a group, casting themselves into their connected pasts, not through the fear that conventionally drives many training regimes, but an appreciation and nostalgia for the skills they once honed and tap into now. We know they’re hired here. We’re watching their current freelance gig: synchronising with sound and each other, performing this age-old, joy/challenge on stage—ensemble training, guided by energetic beats. There is no typical, abusive dance teacher surveilling, cycling their trauma. The dancer is the driver, the steps are the map, the rhythm is the road.
Watching people do moves is sweet, but what’s this show doing? Where does it locate its authorship? Toil confirms many common conceits about traditional dance training, and I wonder, despite the team’s sense of fun and empathy, how this artwork frames the non-productive labour it seeks to exhibit, beyond reiterating and objectifying its tried routines.
Toil by Sheena McGrandles, premiered at HAU2 from 3–6 December 2025.
