How Canberra’s young dancers are taking on their most ambitious challenge yet

Posted on 29 June, 2026

Power. Corruption. Surveillance. Psychological warfare. Not your typical contemporary dance themes – but then again, The Training Ground has never been particularly interested in playing it safe.

Returning to Erindale Theatre this July, Canberra’s award-winning pre-professional contemporary dance program is premiering The Edge – a gripping new full-length work that explores corporate greed, manipulation, and the cost of speaking up when everyone else stays silent.

It’s The Training Ground’s sixth production since launching in 2020, and according to artistic directors Bonnie Neate and Suzy Piani, it’s also their most ambitious.

“We want people to walk out asking themselves: would I have said something?” says Bonnie. “At what point does staying quiet become complicity?”

It’s a question that sits at the heart of The Edge, which follows a promising new employee who joins what appears to be a prestigious corporate firm, only to discover something far more sinister lurking beneath the polished surface.

As surveillance intensifies, colleagues behave with unsettling compliance, and a culture of fear hides behind corporate jargon, Employee A begins to uncover the truth about the organisation they’ve entered. But exposing corruption comes at a cost – and conscience may be the most dangerous thing in the room.

From ballet deconstruction to original storytelling

Photography: Eileen Kelliher and Richard Wood, Brightwoods Productions

For audiences who have followed The Training Ground’s journey, The Edge represents the latest evolution in a creative trajectory that has steadily pushed beyond traditional dance narratives.

Earlier productions such as Unveiled and Unravel deconstructed classical ballets, stripping away familiar costumes and conventions to examine the emotional core of stories like Giselle and Romeo and Juliet.

Those works taught Bonnie and Suzy to focus on the psychological foundations of a narrative rather than simply retelling a plot.

“What are the emotional bones of it?” Suzy explains. “What survives when you strip away the costume and the convention?”

The shift became even more apparent in later original works such as Wired and The Fold. While both productions featured narrative scaffolding, they relied increasingly on movement, visual symbolism and atmosphere to drive the story. Wired explored themes of control and confinement, while The Fold pushed further into psychological storytelling, building the layered, emotionally complex style that has become a hallmark of The Training Ground’s work.

“We have always been drawn to psychologically complex themes and narratives – the things people recognise but don’t say out loud. Power dynamics, manipulation, the erosion of self. These aren’t abstract concepts; they are lived experiences, and dance has this amazing ability to make people feel something they can’t quite articulate,” says Bonnie.

“With The Edge, we started with a basic idea of exploring corporate greed, and we went down a rabbit hole exploring that particular dread of realising the environment you trusted is designed to consume you.”

Finding yourself on the edge

Photography: Eileen Kelliher and Richard Wood, Brightwoods Productions

Every Training Ground production has featured a strong visual and thematic anchor.

Audiences who saw Wired may remember the recurring motif of walls and confinement, while The Fold used fabric as both a visual and narrative device. Those productions established a creative signature that combines movement with powerful symbolic imagery – something that continues in The Edge.

“The Fold set a very high benchmark – in storytelling complexity, in the visual world we built, in the emotional demands on our cast. The response from audiences and critics pushed us to ask: what do we do next that genuinely challenges us rather than simply repeating what we know works?”, says Suzy.

The pair say that The Edge is more ambitious in its thematic weight. Corporate corruption, psychological warfare, the cost of moral courage – these are not gentle ideas. They have also pushed further with their visual language and the integration of contemporary dance with cinematic elements, digital animation and theatrical design to create an environment that deteriorates alongside the narrative itself.

“But really the biggest lift is in the choreography itself,” says Bonnie.

“We are asking our dancers to carry a narrative with very complex and demanding choreography; it is deliberately unsettling in the themes, and we are asking them to do it with both precision and vulnerability. That is a very particular and demanding combination.”

Office desks become far more than props. They transform into symbols of relentless labour, corporate control and dehumanisation. Dancers move on them, around them and against them, using the hard edges and restrictive structures of the corporate environment as choreographic partners. The result is a world that begins with clinical precision before gradually fracturing as the truth emerges.

“With The Edge, we have again created movement that defines the mood. We are asking dancers to embody states of being – surveillance, compliance, fracture – not just characters,” says Suzy.

“The choreography is therefore not illustrating the story; it is the story itself.”

Building opportunities close to home

Photography: Eileen Kelliher and Richard Wood, Brightwoods Productions

While the productions themselves continue to grow in scale and complexity, The Training Ground was founded with another goal in mind: creating meaningful pathways for Canberra dancers.

When the program launched, many talented young performers felt they needed to leave Canberra to pursue serious contemporary dance opportunities.

“We were simply losing our best young dancers to other states,” Bonnie says.

Six years on, that picture is beginning to change.

The Training Ground provides advanced dancers with an intensive six-month company-style experience that extends beyond traditional studio training. Participants rehearse and perform full-length works, collaborate with creatives across multiple disciplines, and develop the professional skills required for auditions and tertiary dance programs.

The results speak for themselves.

Past cast members have gone on to secure places at prestigious institutions including the New Zealand School of Dance, the Victorian College of Arts and the Sydney Dance Company Pre-Professional Year.

For Bonnie and Suzy, those outcomes are just as important as the productions themselves.

“The company experience, the full-length work, the professional discipline – it prepares them in ways that a studio competition circuit simply cannot replicate,” says Suzy.

“What keeps us coming back is watching a dancer do something in Week 24 that they could not conceive of doing in Week One. That transformation – technical, psychological, creative — is extraordinary to witness.”

Impressive homegrown talent

Photography: Eileen Kelliher and Richard Wood, Brightwoods Productions

The Training Ground’s productions have won multiple Canberra Critics Circle and CAT Awards – validating what local artists can achieve. Because producing original contemporary dance at this scale is no small undertaking.

Every production involves months of intensive training, original choreography, animation, technical design and collaboration. For an independent Canberra-based organisation without the resources of a major metropolitan company, it’s a significant commitment.

But it’s one Bonnie and Suzy continue to make because they believe Canberra audiences deserve ambitious contemporary dance created locally.

“We genuinely believe that Canberra deserves this,” says Bonnie.

“It deserves ambitious, original, world-class contemporary dance made right here, by people who live here.”

With themes that feel uncomfortably relevant, a striking visual world and a cast of emerging dancers pushing themselves further than ever before, The Edge looks set to challenge audiences long after the curtain falls.

Photography of The Edge poster by Eliza Swiderski, ES Fotografi