| When | Where | Admission |
|---|---|---|
Wed 7 October 12pm |
University Square, Leicester Street, Parkville Google maps |
Free Bookings via Fringe Book Now |
Experience a dance performance by Jacob Coppedge, where body, strap, and structure collide to reveal tension, resistance, and release.
Blue. Strap. Sit. is a choreographic work by VCA Master of Dance student Jacob Coppedge, created in collaboration with University of Melbourne alumni Joshua Edward. The work observes how the body negotiates impedance and spatially questions order, as straps, harnesses, and architectural forms are treated as active partners—factors that guide, provoke, and shift movement.
Through leaning, bracing, yielding, and pulling, the work illuminates pressures built into seemingly ordinary spaces. Each gesture carries intent, articulating a physical vocabulary that language cannot.
Rooted in Black, Brown, and queer embodiment and drawing from underground dance styles and contemporary practice, the movement reveals conditions of vulnerability, defiance, and care. Enter a space where tension becomes choreography and resilience becomes potential, and witness how new possibilities can emerge from within the very structures that confine us.
Visit
Performances:
Wed 7 October 12pm
Thu 8 October, 6pm
Fri 9 October, 6pm
Free event. Secure your spot now.
Presented by MPavilion Parkville, as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival. This project has been developed by the support of Dance House, Lucy Guerin and Performance Space.
Bookings via Fringe
Book Now
About
MPavilion Parkville is the University of Melbourne’s open-air space for art, ideas and experimentation. Visit University Square for workshops, pop-ups, installations and unexpected encounters throughout the semester.
Presenters
Jacob Coppedge (b. 1996, Philadelphia) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on Wurundjeri land, Naarm. Of African American and Dutch–Indonesian–Malay heritage, their practice is shaped by cultural displacement and the search for coherence across fractured lineages. Working across movement, performance, and object-based forms, Coppedge explores identity, queerness, sensuality, and liberation. Their work examines how bodies navigate power within colonial structures, creating space to reimagine belonging, negotiate tension, and pursue embodied and material forms of freedom.
Joshua Edward is Co-Founder & Editor (fine art) at no more poetry, an independent poetry and fine-art press in Melbourne. They also produce work through their conceptual agency, Parliament, existing as a way of gathering projects under one masthead and speaking about them in the clipped, overconfident language of corporate branding. It keeps the work slightly removed from the self, gives each project its own room, and stops everything from dissolving into one long, unstructured autobiography. They exhibit regularly in sculpture, following formal studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, and their work has been shown in Australia, Germany & USA.