Review: TWO BLOOD at Odeon Theatre

Reviewed by Ray Smith, Friday 7th August 2026.

This was my second viewing of Two Blood by Australian Dance Theatre. I was lucky enough to witness the premiere of this extraordinary work in 2025, and it is always interesting to see how a dance work can evolve over time.

This production was a collaborative one and Daniel Riley, the Artistic Director, describes his role as Co-Creator (Co-Director/ Co-Choreographer) with Jasmin Sheppard, Co-Creator (Co-Choreographer/ Co-Director/ Tagalaka and Chinese Story Advisor, and S. Shakthidharan, Co-Creator (Co-Director/ Writer).

The same, deceptively simple set greeted us as we entered the performance space. A large grey circle filled the stage floor and was bracketed by two large and movable screens that looked for all the world like enormous mobile telephones, and that it seemed was all there was to it.

Daniel Riley himself welcomed us to country and gave us an overview of the work we were about to see and told us that the story that was about to unfold before us was a complex one of forbidden love between a Tagalaka woman and Cantonese man, fire ravaged country, discrimination, racial tension, and yet a deep sense of belonging, and Australian Dance Theatre chose a multidisciplinary approach to telling it.

The production I saw in 2025 boasted six dancers in total, but a seventh dancer had been added in the 2026 production. That dancer is Jasmin Sheppard's sister, Carly Sheppard. So, not only does one of the collaborators have a direct familial connection to one of the main characters in this extraordinary story, but one of the dancers also has the opportunity to physically tell her Grandmother's story in this compelling work.

The dancers had microphones and narrated their parts in this tale as they danced, the screens blazed with footage of a burning landscape, or images of a star-filled night sky as they were moved around the performance space by the dancers themselves, framing the action or communicating with each other in texts in different languages, as the dancers' movements blurred and finally destroyed the grey circle. The grey circle of ash remained pristine while only Carly Sheppard moved through the space, but was soon scattered across the stage when the entire troupe burst into action.

The soundscape crackled and roared like fire in treetops, bass notes shaking our very chairs, or whispered like the secrets of lovers as the dancers threw themselves into this muscular work.

The seamless fusion of movement, music, film, image and literal storytelling is yet another example of this company's fearless determination to break new ground and, once again, they accomplished their goal with superb artistry.

As Jasmin Sheppard puts it, “This is the story of my ancestral line, and the shared story of so many First Nations people, where Chinese and other cultures have collided with our communities leaving lasting imprints in our cultures, language, and our relationship to food, land and each other. It’s a story that reflects so much of who we are as First Nations people, yet we rarely see this reflected back to us in our world.”

This was the first time that I had attended a matinee performance at my beloved Odeon Theatre, and entering the foyer at 11.00am felt very strange indeed, but I soon felt even stranger when busload upon busload of high school students filled the space to capacity and spilled out onto the pavement outside. It was wonderful to see that some schools in South Australia are giving their students the opportunity to witness one of the truly great dance companies in the world tell stories from this country, their country. This young and attentive audience was held spellbound by this dynamic, explosive work, and I am quite sure that this will not be the last dance performance that they will attend, perhaps as performers as well as observers.

Australian Dance Theatre takes their role as storytellers and educators very seriously, and even as I type this, the company is preparing to tour this work to major interstate venues and, as they often do, back to country.

About Carly Sheppard.

Carly Sheppard is a cross-disciplinary performance artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, working across dance, theatre making, performance, sculpture, drawing, writing, voice and installation. Her practice navigates complex narratives of intersecting race, class, mythologies, identities we inherit and how meaning is created and processed through prisms of colonial interruption. Sheppard’s work reflects her fascination with the chaos of conflicting cultural paradigms.