Avignon Festival: Amrita Hepi examines Australian colonial history

Unknown in France, the multidisciplinary artist and choreographer Amrita Hepi (born in 1989), whose name is beginning to circulate between Asia and the United States, is stopping in Avignon. There she performs her first piece, entitled Rinse , created in 2020 with the playwright Mish Grigor. On tour since 2022, this solo is rooted in Amrita Hepi's personal trajectory, reverberating it, in particular, with the colonial question in Australia.

Amrita Hepi was born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. On her father's side, she is connected to the Bundjalung Aboriginal community, located on Australia's east coast, where approximately 800 Aboriginal groups live, as well as to the Ngapuhi Maori tribe, based in northern New Zealand, and to England; on her Australian mother's side, she has roots in England and Ireland. These multiple facets are summoned in Rinse, which frames its process within the notion of beginning and origin. "I trace many beginnings: those of a love story, of a nation, of a new language, of empires, " she explains. "To be Aboriginal and Australian is to have this heritage and to belong to a people who have existed for 60,000 years."

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