Contemporary Aance Artist and Performance Maker
Janette Hoe is an independent Melbourne-based contemporary dance artist and performance maker. Her practice is grounded in Butoh, and informed by Eastern and Western somatic, movement-based improvisation modalities.
Janette identifies strongly with her hybrid Malaysian-Chinese-Indonesian heritage which carries through into rich stories in her visceral improvisation work. She is committed to working with other artists of colour, celebrating cultural diversity and advocating for contemporary work that is not relegated to ‘cultural’ or ‘community’ spaces in the mainstream.
Preferring to work site-specifically in non-theatre settings, her distinctive dance aesthetic intersects the narratives of time and place, with personal experiences, rituals and ancestry. Addressing themes of ‘home’, ‘sense of place’ and ‘loss’, her captivating and visually evocative performances invite audiences into landscapes where fragments of memory, lived experiences and imagination meet.
Over the last 25 years, Janette has created numerous solo performances and collaborative works with artists from various artforms, across cultures throughout Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Dance Australia Critics Survey nominated Janette ‘Dancer to Watch’ for her artistic-driven full length works No Candles Please (2006) and moths are calling (2014). Granted an Australian Postgraduate Award, Janette completed a practice-led Masters by Research project investigating embodied histories in dance improvisation.