Jo Lloyd is a dance artist working with choreography as a social encounter. Operating across live performance, film and often in collaboration with visual artists, Lloyd’s work frequently employs duration and circumstance to unearth unexpected behaviours and outcomes.

Out of theatre, 2023, is a series of four performances taking place in Community Hall. Commissioned especially for Melbourne Now, Out of theatre is a work devised with the gallery space in mind, allowing for theatrical conventions and traditional notions of the audience to be readjusted and decentred. While choreography is typically a structured pursuit, relying on controlled compositions of space and time, Out of theatre joyfully relinquishes this control to explore the idea of what Lloyd calls ‘non-thinking dance’. Playing with repeated logic and the retracing of patterns, the resulting quartet of performances subtly erodes over time, blurring the lines between the inherent concreteness and ephemerality of movement-based performance.

Artist

Jo Lloyd is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts and has performed and presented her work in galleries and theatres in Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia, including RISING, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the National Gallery of Australia, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Bundanon Art Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. A commissioning artist for the 2020 Keir Choreographic Award, she recently created the film and live work Archive the Archive for the National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now. Her work Overture, 2018–19, received three Green Room Awards and a Helpmann Award nomination. Lloyd has performed in the works of Shelley Lasica, Sandra Parker, Lucy Guerin and Gideon Obarzanek (Chunky Move 2003–2008), and has also collaborated with visual artists including David Rosetzky, Sally Smart, Stephen Bram, and Alicia Frankovich. Jo currently works out of her studio at the Abbotsford Convent.

Performers
Rachael Wisby, Thomas Woodman, Jo Lloyd
Design
Andrew Treloar
Music
Duane Morrison