Joel Bray

About Joel

A Melbourne-based artist, Joel Bray is of Wiradjuri, Scottish and English heritage.

Joel’s body-of-work includes Biladurang (2017), commissioned for the 2017 Melbourne Fringe and was awarded BEST PERFORMANCE in the Fringe Awards. The work is touring nationally to the 2018 Darwin and Brisbane Festivals, the 2018 Bendigo Queer Film Festival and the 2019 Sydney Festival. His work Machines of More (2016), which interrogates the brutal abbreviated dialect used by gay men on online dating apps, was commissioned by the 2016 IntimaDance Festival in Tel Aviv. Other works include Zero to A Hundred (2016) for the Albania Dance Theatre and Match (2016) for Kolben Dance in Jerusalem. Joel was the Artist-in-Residence at NAISDA Dance College and created Augury (2015) for the student body.

Joel is currently making a new commission for CHUNKY MOVE; he is a grantee of the 2018 Australia Council’s Indigenous Signature Works funding; and he is currently co-commissioned by the Performance Space and Yirramboi Festival to make a new work entitled Candy from Strangers for 2019. Joel was the recipient of a 2015 STRUT WA SEED residency, an Australian Dance Awards Nomination for Best Performer in 2017, and is a member of the Melbourne Greenroom Awards Dance Jury

He began dancing at age 20, in Traditional and Contemporary dance at NAISDA Dance College. He went on to graduate from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2005.

Joel is an ongoing performer with CHUNKY MOVE and has performed and toured in Complexity of Belonging (2014) and An Act of Now (2017), and with Anouk van Dijk and Falk Richter in Safe Places (2016) at the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus. Joel’s career spans France, Portugal and Israel with Jean-Claude Gallotta, Company CeDeCe , Kolben Dance, Machol Shalem Dance House, Yoram Karmi’s FRESCO Dance Company, Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor and Roy Assaf.

Joel’s choreographic practice springs from his Wiradjuri cultural heritage. Rather than attempting to recreate a supposed Indigenous ‘form’, his methodology is rooted in traditional Wiradjuri ways of making work: durational, site-specific and cross-genre processes. His works are often intimate encounters with small audiences in unorthodox spaces, in which audience-members are ‘invited in’ as co-storytellers and co-performers.

Running themes in his work include the experiences of fair-skinned Aboriginal people and the unique forms of subtle racism they face, and the experiences of contemporary gay men in an increasingly digital and isolated world. His body becomes the intersection site of those songlines- his Indigenous heritage, his skin-colour and his queer sexuality.