You, Beauty by Chunky Move
Imagine You, Beauty by Chunky Move as Stranger Things meets Inception, but instead of slipping through dream layers, you are slowly consumed by a vast, breathing inflatable, a Dali canvas made three-dimensional: part cloud, part sea creature, part otherworldly mass. The work unfolds like a lucid dream, revealing itself in waves.
It begins with the audience sitting outside an inflatable structure which occupies most of the room. Its presence is ambiguous and organic, hovering somewhere between architecture and alien life that bellows around the room. It inhales and exhales, subtly at first, until the space feels alive — as though the room itself has developed a pulse.
Samakshi [Sidhu] appears. She is immediately dwarfed by the scale of the form, her body set against an immense, shifting partner. Her movement begins cautiously before giving way to curiosity. She tests the surface, listens to its response, traces its contours. Each gesture feels like a question posed to the structure, an attempt to understand the rules of this unfamiliar terrain. The breathing, undulating world that both resists and invites her touch. The choreography twists and turns like Black Swan meets La La Land: at once technically sharp, haunting and whimsical.
The choreography shifts as the inflatable expands. She circles it, pushes against it, gets repelled and drawn back in almost like a negotiation between a human body and an uncontrollable force. The movements, athletic and sharp at moments, soft and yielding at other times, are a dialogue between the inflatable and the dancer. It becomes a partner, a shelter as she slides, climbs and disappears into the folds of the structure.
Midway through the performance, the audience is invited to step inside the structure. Almost womb like inside the inflatable marking a tonal shift, the exterior spectacle giving way to an intimate interior world – dim and resonant with the [breathing] sounds of the structure. Here, Samakshi is joined by Enzo [Nazario]. Their movements are more intentional, ritualistic and less performative. The gestures are slow, the choreography feels intimate and part of their love story, even amusing at times. The performers dance, laugh, hum, play a little keyboard and, at the end Samakshi sings, ‘He is my sexy little piano man’ while carrying Enzo out of the structure, marking the end of the performance. They seem like Neo and Trinity caught in a Matrix slo-mo fight inside a psychedelic ball and this ball is inflatable, enormous, and shaping the world around them. The work ends not with resolution but release: the structure settles, movement subsides, and what remains is a lingering sense of having witnessed a temporary ecosystem where beauty was unstable, immersive, and deeply physical.
The 40-minute piece is riveting and playful, a Doctor Strange bent reality but with contemporary dance and a giant inflatable.
Performed by Samakshi Sidhu and Enzo Nazario and choreographed by Antony Hamilton, brought to Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa by Asia TOPA, Arts Centre Melbourne and the Centre for Australia-India Relations as part of the Thukral & Tagra’s Multiplay 02: Soft Systems curation.
Words Samiksha Sharma
Date 15.01.2026