The Shepherds - About
THE SHEPHERDS
[WORK IN PROGRESS]
THE SHEPHERDS
INVENTING KINSHIP, RITUAL AND ICONS
By Carly Sheppard and Alisdair Macindoe
They share a surname but not a story.
As children of scattered lineages, Sheppard and Macindoe grew up inside gaps, names without anchors, family trees with broken branches, histories arriving half-told. In The Shepherds, they take what’s missing and make it matter.
The two Shepherds meet in the expanse between origin and future and begin to build kinship from absence: conjuring rites, forging new symbols, and transforming objects into relics and icons of an imagined tradition.
Through physically charged choreography, text, and an enveloping sound world by Lawrence English, The Shepherds dreams up mirages of the past, confronts the urgencies of the present, and dares to imagine a future defined by renewed kinship and care. Moving fluidly between ritual, confession, and acts of collective making, the work becomes both a reckoning with legacy and an act of contemporary myth-making.
At once epic and intimate, The Shepherds is an unholy, dream-lit monument to cultural succession in the wake of colonisation and the pressures of late-stage capitalism. To celebrate it. To question it. To re-make it. A work for anyone raised by stories they had to finish themselves.
The Shepherds is a hymn to the kin we choose—and the traditions we dare to invent.
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The Shepherds is a full-length genre bending dance work directed and performed by co-creators Carly Sheppard and Alisdair Macindoe. Two unrelated artists who share a surname mine their fractured family histories to invent new kinship, new rites and new symbols. Through physically charged choreography, live voice and an immersive sound world, The Shepherds examines cultural succession in the wake of colonisation and the pressures of late-stage capitalism.
CREATIVES & COMPANY
Concept, direction, choreography, text & performance: Carly Sheppard*, Alisdair Macindoe*
Dramaturge & co-writer: Emily Tomlins*
Sound design & composition: Lawrence English*
Instrument design/build: Alisdair Macindoe*
Set, costume & object design: Jonathan Oxlade*
Design assistant: Geoffrey Watson
Lighting design: Katie Sfetkidis
Performers/dancers: Tyrel Dulvarie + Karlia Cook
Producers: Jason Cross & Stella Webster (Insite Arts)
Production Manager: TBC
Development dancer / performer: Geoffrey Watson
photos: T J Garvie Photography
*Sidney Myer Fellow
CONTACT
Jason CROSS - jason@insitearts.com.au
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Form: Contemporary dance with text, live voice, live and prerecorded music, and object-led design
Themes: Migration, intergenerational rupture, social roles, cultural succession, environmental collapse, totalitarian capitalism, colonisation, shepherding.
Aesthetics: Invented traditions and invented cultural iconography; repurposed, low-waste materials; objects as choreographic partners; hand-built instruments and field recordings in the score
Audience experience: Clear dramaturgy and grounded delivery; no specialist knowledge required; invites reflection rather than prescribing answers
SYNOPSIS
Carly and Alisdair share a family name but not a lineage. Confronting gaps, contradictions and losses in their family stories, they fabricate a shared heritage in real time—testing how traditions begin, how symbols stick, and who gets to keep them. The performance moves between portrait, ritual and inquiry: kinetic vignettes of migration and labour; invented rites performed with purpose-built objects; interrogations that question who inherits what and why; confessional fragments and song. A design language of newly minted symbols—garments, devices, tools—meets a score of field recordings and handmade instruments. The Shepherds asks how we might invent belonging that is accountable, adaptive and alive.
WHY NOW
Audiences are negotiating competing narratives about identity, ownership and care. The Shepherds opens a space to consider how we create meaning together under systems we didn’t choose. It pairs rigour with accessibility, speaking across contemporary dance, theatre and music audiences in both urban and regional contexts.
FORMAT
Duration: 50-60 minutes, no interval
Venue: Black box or proscenium theatres; adaptable to flexible spaces with adequate tech
Language: English
Age guidance: 15+ (themes include trauma and social interrogation; no graphic content)
Accessibility: Access-informed documentation and audience pathways; post-show conversations encouraged
DEVELOPMENT & HISTORY
Commissioned by the Sydney Myer Fund
Stage one (2 weeks) - Carly and Alisdair, Coborg Courthouse 2025 - CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Stage two (2 weeks) - Carly Alisdair, and dancers, Temperance Hall - CHOREOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT
Stage three (1 week) Key collaborators, Temperance Hall - DESIGN, TEXT, & CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Stage four (1 week) - Carly Alisdair, and dancers, UMAC. CHOREOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT
DEVELOPMENT & PRESENTATION future
Stage five (3 weeks) CONFIRMED - LG/WXYZ Chloe Munro Studio - SHOW BUILDING DEVELOPMENT 1/2
Stage six (3 weeks) TBC - SHOW BUILDING DEVELOPMENT 2/2
Stage seven (3 weeks) Preview week and two week presentation.
ARTISTIC APPROACH
Choreography: Contemporary choreographic sequences with improvisation scores; physical vocabularies drawn from invented rites, roles and tools
Text & voice: Testimony, exchanges and playful pseudo-ethnographies shaped with dramaturgy
Sound: Lawrence English’s composition intertwines field recordings and newly built instruments (alphorn-inspired and other resonators) with live voice
Design: Jonathan Oxlade develops an object/garment system that embodies invented cultural iconography; modular, low-waste and tour-ready
Instruments/objects: Built by Macindoe; objects function as kinetic partners and carry symbolic weight
AUDIENCE & PROGRAMMINGDance & Visual Theatre audiences - those specifically interested in contemporary dance-theatre.
Broader younger audiences (non-arts going) aged between 15-35 years due to cultural/political relevance and visual aesthetic of the work.
Diverse cultures and people whose language is not English as a 1st language due to visual form of the work.
Programs engaging in post-colonial discourse, sustainability, identity and new choreographic practice.
Metro & regional audiences – harnessing the iconography of ‘sheep’ and farming which is entrenched in so-called-Australia’s national history (our aim is to tour the work to regional/rural areas where there is a history of sheep farming).
International audiences: our desire is that the work shares a “story” story which reaches people & audiences of different places around the world where sheep & history of Shepards is part of their culture & history - which adds up to many places & people.
SCALE
Ideal for festivals and mid-scale venues programming contemporary performance.
Suitable for venues seating 100-400 pax.
Blackbox/pros arch stages.
4-person performance, with production design by Jonathan Oxlade that can be scaled up or down to fit the space, but we would require a minimum playing space of 12m x 12m
Artists statement
We started working on The Shepherds because, despite sharing a last name, our separate family stories felt like puzzles with missing and mismatched pieces. Growing up, we both felt that sense of not quite belonging, or wanting to re-frame our story, of always searching for connection where history runs thin, lips are sealed, or the record just stops. Our collaboration is about admitting what we don’t know, laughing at the oddities, confronting our inherited beliefs, and sharing the strange comfort in making things up as a means to grow and feel a sense of belonging.
This isn’t a search for perfect answers. Instead, we find meaning in the small gestures: telling a tale, sharing a choreography, playing inside a scene, adorning a garment, sharing a glance, or building something together out of things we find along the way. Through creating The Shepherds, we are trying to bring our real questions, stories, and vulnerabilities forward—to show how clumsy, heartfelt, and sometimes funny it is to try and create new rituals when the old ones don’t fit.
The Shepherds is our way of reaching out, hoping others recognise themselves in the messiness and wonder of figuring out where you belong.
