Unveiling Shadows

Unveiling Shadows sets your expectations from the moment you enter the theatre. What you’re about to see will be imaginative, artistic, and risky. The stage is littered with white chairs, some cut to appear if they’re mid-motion and emerging from beneath the floor, others stacked precariously in sculptural piles. A few black chairs and chair parts hover from the ceiling, like shadowed sentinels. The rear is veiled in colourless plastic sheeting, draped thinly over parts of the set so that it becomes both surface and scrim, functional and ghostly. Stage right, a white table hints at the domestic, yet the lamp, vase, photo frame and more dangle from cables, with and internal light glowing in each. The tableau hovers somewhere between reality and apparition. Designed by Ebony Webb and Josephine Reid, the environment reads like an installation that wouldn’t feel out of place at the Gallery of Modern Art.

Unveiling Shadows is a debut work by Joshua Taliani, who is Bidjara/Kullali/Wakka Wakka and Italian, and Father of the House of Alexander (leaders in the queer BIPOC community. It’s a biographical series of segments expressed through contemporary and modern dance, music, soundscape and the aforementioned set design. It’s visually and aurally captivating, with a narrative that while biographical isn’t strictly literal. The segments chart a trajectory through Taliani’s self-discovery; his identity, queerness, and trauma. The dramaturgy is episodic, each sequence anchored in a clear emotional core. What makes the work compelling is how autobiography becomes legible through abstraction.

Steven May’s lighting animates the set and dancer with painterly precision. His timing and placement of spotlights is faultless, guiding the audience’s attention in a space where the performer moves constantly through unexpected configurations. Particularly beautiful is the cyan, magenta, and yellow combination that creates prismatic effects across Taliani’s body. Evoking the perfect emotions, deep reds and blues saturate the stage during a sexual awakening sequence, supporting the passionate sequence with colour. Another striking moment is the evocation of a totem animal where the stage and performer are bathed in a mix of rainbow and white light, which feels like a visual articulation of transcendence.

Sound design (by Brady Watkins in collaboration with Taliani) ranges from textured soundscapes to music-driven propulsion, punctuated by considered silences. Each shift marks a new terrain of memory or struggle. Importantly, the mix is full and immersive without excess. Too often dance theatre underplays volume, leaving atmospheres undernourished; here, the sound supports the physical storytelling with palpable presence.

At the centre of this landscape Joshua Taliani’s performance is distinguished by a rare combination of charisma, confidence, and vulnerability. His body is agile, strong, and fluid, capable of clean isolations, expansive extensions, and amazing flexibility. Taliani’s face is as expressive as his body, and his facial storytelling intensifies the work’s intimacy. But technique is never ornamental: it is always in service of storytelling and connection.

Stand out moments are when he is compelled with a desire to dance like an electric charge running through his veins, the isolation work in the choreography is superb; the special ghostly effect created when Taliani dances behind the plastic sheeting is magical; and the high energy ballroom dancing segment is thrilling.

Co-director/collaborator Wanida Serce along with Taliani has shaped the piece with discipline. While the performance is deeply personal, it resists self-indulgence: the framing is careful, transitions precise, and the design integration seamless. The choice to lean into silence as deeply as sound allows the audience to metabolise the work’s weight rather than be swept along too quickly. What emerges is not simply a strong debut but a total artwork. The set, lights, sound, and performance converge to produce a piece that is visually striking, emotionally raw, and conceptually layered. It is as much installation as dance, as much memoir as choreography.

The Metro Arts is the perfect venue for this show and kudos to Brisbane Festival for programming it. Visually stunning, emotionally moving, and wonderfully thought provoking, Unveiling Shadows demonstrates an artist willing to risk vulnerability, to fuse genres, and to stage biography with both rigour and flair.

Kitty Goodall

Photography by Georgia Haupt