SUPERCELL: Festival of Contemporary Dance Brisbane is co-curated by Kate Usher and Glyn Roberts. Two colleagues who became friends, drink too much coffee and commiserate about Brisbane’s humidity, share a mutual a love for dance. Joining forces they co-founded Supercell with aspirations to create critical mass around the exciting things happening with Dance in Queensland and, to work with the sector, artists and audiences to build a vibrant and respected festival that is quintessentially Brisbane.
The namesake of the festival comes from one evening, 12 months on from a particularly nasty tropical storm where the media dubbed it a ‘supercell’, referring to the collision of multiple particles to create a major event with widespread impact. Beauty, ferocity, spectacle and rejuvenation. Sitting on Glyn’s balcony, watching the storms roll in over the city, basking in the thick humidity and that weird smell Brisbane gets right before the first crack of lighting. We were brainstorming names for our fledgling festival. A notoriously tricky thing. Winds pick up, sky goes green, incoming hail! We sit there watching the storm and the two ideas start to converge. Storms can make one a bit silly and we began joking about referring to the festival as The Supercell Dance Festival.. Dance Supercell.. and well.. the name just stuck. So this is it: Supercell. Brisbane’s contemporary dance festival.
