Two performers glitch, replay, and rewind alongside their digital doubles as they misremember road trip stories in this award-winning experimental dance work that intersects choreography, theatre, and projection.
Uncanny, hilarious, and at times sinister, Tell Distance makes us question exactly how we perceive and move through landscapes. How do we ‘tell distance’ in a world where most of the vanishing points we see are on a screen?
By digitally duplicating and juxtaposing movement and text, Tell Distance questions the accuracy and authority of dominant narratives, and further asks how the misconceptions we assume as true are produced and maintained.
Tell Distance premiered at TheLab@UNSW, the experimental performance hub of Sydney Fringe Festival 2026. It was shortlisted for the Best in Experimental in the third week of the festival.
The work draws from Nasim’s Honours research at UNSW, which studied how colonial narratives impose perspectives of people and place, whilst themselves containing evidence that contradict such impositions.
Awards:
NZ Fringe Tour Ready Award, Sydney Fringe Festival 2026
Reviews:
“[an] uncanny display of independent dance posing as brain-rot. […] Tell Distance is hilarious, witty and incisive. Patel shows us how a simple formula can create a complex network of questions, and the work embodies the questionable nature of truth and the inaccuracy in digital storytelling and 21st century identities.”
-Bianca Yeung, Dancing Sydney
Performances:
16-19 September 2026: Studio One, UNSW, Sydney
Credits
Choreographer: Nasim Patel
Performers: Nasim Patel and Louie Wisby
Mentor and Outside Eye: M@ Cornell
Stage Manager and Technician: Sarah Stormont
Special thanks: Ella Watson-Heath, M@ Cornell, Angela Goh, Martin del Amo, Troy Reid, Mark Mitchell, Harriet Gillies
In development presentations:
14-16 November 2025: Balmain Town Hall, Sydney
16-14 February 2026: PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, Sydney
Development History:
Development for Tell Distance was supported by Critical Path through a Space Grant Residency, Temperance Hall as part of an Apartment Studio Residency, side.step, an event produced by Ella Watson-Heath and supported by Critical Path and Inner West Council. Further development was supported by PACT Centre for Emerging Artists at In the Works: Storyworlds, an event curated by PACT Associate Artists Martin del Amo and Jazz Money and supported by the University of Sydney and the Rex Cramphorn Studio; the Experimental Choreographic Lab presented by Performance Space and Critical Path; and a Moving Ideas Residency from ReadyMade Works
Final development and production was supported by the University of New South Wales and the work was presented as part of TheLab@UNSW, the experimental performance hub of Sydney Fringe Festival.
