Eliza Sanders

Creator. Performer. Teacher

“What a force she is! Compelling. Original. An emerging artist with a mature and distinct creative voice…

Virtuosic, herculean, mercurial, clever and generous.”
- Chris Jannides, Theatreview

I am a movement and theatre artist living in Te-Whanganui-A-Tara whose practice is grounded in a philosophy of learning, creating, and teaching - each element informing the others as passions in their own right. My work spans from durational performance art to meditative poetry podcasts, and I predominantly create theatrical dance works.

As a certified Countertechnique teacher, Vinyasa Yoga teacher, and Contact C.A.R.E practitioner in training, my work is deeply informed by somatic practices. I have choreographed and performed for numerous companies around Aotearoa, Australia and Korea, and have been a full time tutor at The New Zealand School of Dance. I am passionate about continuously growing my capacity to lead safe and nourishing yet creatively risky spaces.

I believe that everyone can and should engage in the arts, that they are a powerful tool for connection, compassion, and joy. As an inheritor of privilege and a white person, I want my art to contribute to decolonisation by engaging in the complicated process of accountability. My work aims to be part of a broader conversation about trauma, privilege, and how we continue to cope, connect, thrive, and contribute in this world.

selected works

Manage Your Expectations

Manage Your Expectations takes the idea of the ‘trigger warning’ to its absurdist extreme using humour to question how ‘informed’ consent can really be and asking, ‘How much do you really want to know?’

Created and performed by multi-award-winning maverick of the stage Eliza Sanders, Manage Your Expectations helps us to see the limits of the power to communicate and our failures to say what we mean. Through a unique blend of dance, clown and absurd philosophising, performer and audience engage in a deeply imperfect exchange, musing on the influence of context, identity and personal history.

House of Sand’s signature melding of forms is back! – not quite dance, not quite theatre, but some secret third thing. Manage Your Expectations is full of vigour and energy with a hint of confrontation and chaos this mind (and body) bending show.

Currently Touring - info here

“Clever, witty, evocative, subversive, immersive, despairing, poignant, personal and universal” – Deirdre Tarrant, Theatreview

“Beautifully vulnerable” – Chloe Jaques, Theatreview

WINNER New Zealand Fringe Festival - Outstanding Solo Performance, San Diego Tour Ready Award. Whangārei Fringe Festival - Standout Individual Performer NOMINATED Wellington Theatre Awards - Most Original Production, New Zealand Fringe - Best in Fringe, Most Innovative Work, Auckland Fringe Tour Ready Award, Adelaide Fringe Tour Ready Award, Melbourne Fringe Tour Ready Award, Sydney Fringe Tour Ready Award

That Was Friday

Who are you, without your community? We are shaped by the bonds we form with others: our blood family, our chosen family, and the communities in which we find ourselves. But what happens when those connections falter, the connecting threads become strained? That Was Friday is a new contemporary performance work about distance and connectedness, familiarity and strangeness.

Moulded from the experience of the queer, trans & culturally diverse team, That Was Friday layers dance, theatre and video in a theatrical collage in an exploration of what it means to search for home and belonging in a globalised world.

Darkly humorous, joyful, and visually stunning, That Was Friday will take your heart and squeeze it.

“A stunning achievement in brave storytelling.” - City news

“Collaborative theatre at it’s most honest, most revealing, and beautifully performed.

A unique theatrical event.” - Peter Wilkins, Canberra critics circle

DANCE. DANCE. HAVE FEELINGS

Dance. Dance. Have Feelings is an entirely improvised, experimental, ensemble dance work. It is the first performance artefact of a dance improvisation method Eliza has been creating in collaboration with an ensemble of artists. The method aims to create entirely improvised works that sit within a predetermined aesthetic framework. The idea is to give freedom and agency to the performers while also expressing a delicately nuanced choreographic voice.

WINNER - NZ Improvisation Festival - Most Magical Moment

UNDOING

UNDOING is an extension of Eliza’s short work for the the New Zealand School of Dance Graduation Season in 2021, featuring recently graduated dancers alongside established independent artists.

Undoing explores the intersection of sincerity and irony, the constant untangling of learning to know yourself and the absurdity (and occasional chaos) of live performance.

E.motion

e.motion is a 4 hour gallery performance installation which explores the nature of emotion and being seen. Eliza improvises non-stop with the intention to move from and with her emotion continuously, noticing how the audiences presence affects her desire to be seen and influences her (e)motions. The audiences is gently invited to challenge their habitual ways of viewing and responding to performance with a list of gentle provocations of how they might engage with the space, themselves and the performer. e.motion is a base concept for a work that can be translated to numerous different settings, spaces, environments. The work is both the product and an artefact of ongoing research.

View the ‘How to engage with this work’ document

HERE

all hOurs

all hOurs is a 24-hour performance event in public spaces uniting dance, contemporary music and video art. Three artists create/perform live for 24 hours straight, after the performance a video installation of the work remains in the footprint for the public to enjoy. It is a spectacle of stamina, a complex meditation on daily life cycles, and most importantly, a reminder that challenges cannot be overcome alone.

“a sweet meditation and welcome disruption in an unlikely place.

I found myself marvelling at the beautiful digital installation, wishing I could stay for the whole 24 hours.”

- Audience comment, September 2019

Triptych

Triptych is a series of three immersive dance theatre works exploring the nature of parent child relationships, overpopulation, memory and nurturing. They use innovative design to create transformational space.

The design and the choreography combine to create a variety of gentle immersive possabilities, giving audiences the agency to choose how they encounter the work - ranging from a traditional audience experience to up-close encounters with the work through opting to view from the floor and within the space.

There is sophistication in the thinking that underlies the creation of Fear of Eggs...

To be adult, in relation to past-child-selves, creates an opening that is intriguing and satisfying to watch.’

- DANZ Magazine 2018

Womb Man

Womb Man is a durational dance installation piece. Over three hours a the ‘Womb Man’ grapples with her desire to nurture and to be nurtured in an increasingly unstable environment. Womb Man places the youthful female form in a strange and grotesque setting with elements that hint to sexuality, motherhood, nurturing and dependency. 

Pedal.Peddle & Castles

Pedal.Peddle & Castles a series of contemporary performance solos that premiered in 2015 & 2016 and toured around Australia and Aotearoa in repertory until 2018. Archetypal stories told in atypical, nonsensical ways, Peddal.Peddle and Castles are scored by Eliza’s live voice as she recited stream of conscious nonsense poetry non-stop while she dances. They feature an integration of transformative costumes and puppets to explore intimacy, romance, transience and loss.

Some of Eliza’s other work includes …….

A solo dance work in collaboration with Glenn Ashworth: Sarah (Bats 2020) Which investigated the potentialities of design lead processes attempting inverted form based hierarchies in performance creation

A series of interactive poetry podcast: Motion Poetry (2020) is a sharing of poetry that has been written in response to live dance. Each session is delivered with information to enable listeners to move creatively in response. Listen HERE

Classes and Workshop Series - For curious & creative movers of all varieties. Read more HERE

Images by Lorna Sim, Stephen A’Court & Phillip Merry. Footage & edits by Jacob Edmonds & Natsuko Yonezawa