After being awarded a two week residency at Chez Bushwick experimental dance studio in Brooklyn New York, Cadi McCarthy & Company were pleased to present the new work ‘Grappling for the Edge’ at the Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre. The work follows individuals in their struggles to keep afloat in modern society.
The work asks the questions: what is really important in life? Do we really make our own decisions any more or does society make them for us.  When does desire to be someone else reach breaking point?  Where is your edge and how close are you to slipping off?

In today’s commercial world, when we are bombarded with a multitude of confounding and confused messages, how do we decide what’s important as we inevitably lose perspective and push the boundaries of personal stability?

Cadi McCarthy’s mission is to make dance accessible through dialogue, and aspects of humour so it’s a mix of dance, theatre and everyday life.  “ We refer to interest rates, and the rise in the cost of petrol, superannuation, and life insurance. 

The performance itself is a series of vignettes about individuals. It starts of with footage of trains filmed in New York depicting a fast moving world with people not taking time out to be together or make contact because we’re all so anxious to get to the next place.  We take not time to actually look at people as we rush through our days.

The overriding theme is that we have forgotten that people are important.
Canberra Times – Arts – A Muse in Materialism – Jenny Kingma

Review – Canberra Times – A lithe look into the longings of the human heart – Wed Oct 15th 2008

The impact of Cadi McCarthy’s recent experiences during her Churchill Fellowship and a residency with New York’s Chez Bushwicks’ studio is strikingly apparent in her most recent work Grappling for the Edge.  The work retains the lithe and sinuous originality of her earlier works combined with a mischievous sense of humour and wry, ironic comment on young people’s struggles in a modern worlds,  but ‘Grappling For The Edge’ is a more mature work,  more adventurous in its physical interpretation of McCarthy’s recurring theme of the struggle between expectation and emotional need,  society’s pressure and personal relationships.

The work opens with Caroline Martin’s sped up film of people on the streets of New York.  Another film assaults with the image of a speeding train, forever moving forward.  In this pressured world, obsessed with material gain or economic survival, McCarthy’s characters reach out, in a series of beautifully evocative vignettes, for the comfort of human contact.

Chrissy Norford and Dean Cross languish at the barrier of a broken relationship, Laura Boynes and David Mueller cling with ardour to the burning desire to be needed, while Patrice Smith provides comic relief as she recites her fairy tale dream.

McCarthy’s art is to hold the moment in poetic dance, to capture the form and breath life and meaning into every gesture, every nuance and every line and flow of the dancer’s movement.

The rapport is a delight to watch the dancer’s harmonious motion of thought and feeling, at times charged with pathos, at times comical, at times cheeky and satirical. 

Canberra has had an unfortunate and chequered history of retaining its talented contemporary dance companies.  McCarthy is a talent to nurture, encourage and promote.  Canberra deserves a company of the calibre of cadi McCarthy & Company.
Peter Wilkins – October 2008 – Grappling for the Edge

Review – Grappling for the Edge -

For her first new work since returning from seven months overseas on a Churchill Fellowship, choreographer Cadi McCarthy has chosen to explore her concerns about the financial and social pressures of living in the modern world.

Utilizing the talents of five well-trained dancers, a few assorted props including a couple of huge piles of photo-copy paper, a table and chairs, and some compelling projections, McCarthy has created a remarkably cohesive and accessible series of intriguing vignettes, which clearly illustrate her concerns in dance terms, while leaving the observer space for their own interpretations.

The work commences with five dancers dressed in business suits moving to the accompaniment of projected images of busy subway trains. This quickly establishes the sense of a busy city, and the feelings of alienation in a crowd. Later, the girls change into dresses, and we observe a young man on a mobile phone, surrounded by piles of bills and credit cards, trying unsuccessfully to sort out an error in his account. A young woman tries to convince us that it’s all about her in a stream-of-consciousness monologue. We are subjected to a funny, motivational lecture. A young couple attempt to re-connect, in a sensitively choreographed duet.

Many moments are seamlessly woven together, until the work finally resolves in two mesmerisingly haunting duos. The dancing throughout is impressive, particularly in the unison sections, where the five dancers, Laura Boynes, Dean Cross, David Mueller, Chrissy Norford and Patrice Smith perform the intricate choreography confidently and expressively.

With its strong choreographic imprint, “Grappling for the Edge” is an impressive new work from Cadi McCarthy, who now displays a new found sense of confidence in guiding and shaping her talented dancers into a cohesive and sensitive medium with which to express her ideas cohesively, and most importantly, entertainingly.
Bill Stephens, City News-  October 2008