Shaun Parker and Company, founded by award-winning director and choreographer Shaun Parker in 2010, will soon return to Europe with Parker’s acclaimed dance-theatre production, KING.
The work, which was praised as “a tour de force both of creation and performance” by ArtsHub reviewer Dennis Clements in 2023, has been invited for a short season at Belgrade Dance Festival 2025.
KING interrogates the oppressive societal structures that hinder the natural development of male sexuality, and will be staged at Terazije Theatre, Belgrade on 25 and 26 March 2025.
The production was first performed in Sydney in 2019 (and relaunched post-COVID as part of Sydney World Pride 2023). It is billed as “a tribute to a society that is rebelling against a dysfunctional patriarchal tradition,” Parker said in a media statement.
Speaking with ArtsHub, Parker expands upon the personal origins of the work and its themes.
“So KING is not about me, but it was definitely inspired by several elements of growing up as a boy in Mildura, a country town in the seventies,” he says.
“That’s the point of departure: this notion that, when I grew up, I wasn’t allowed to dance, I wasn’t allowed to sing, because I was a male. If I smiled, I’d get punched. You know, ‘you’re gay’, ‘you’re this’, ‘you’re that’, ‘you’re a [f-word]’. There was a very heightened definition of what a boy or a man should be; it was really hard-edged, Mildura in the 1970s. It was full on.
“And you wouldn’t dare to step outside of what was expected, you know? And I dared, because I’m stubborn and so, of course, I got into a lot of trouble and fights and got brutalised quite a bit because I was quite a creative boy. And why can’t a boy be creative?” Parker asks rhetorically.
Such themes permeate the work, which is set in an imagined space that’s part cocktail bar, part jungle – a setting conceived by Parker in collaboration with long-standing friend and supporter, Australian philanthropist and horticulturalist Penny Hunstead, who makes her first foray into stage design with KING.
“But running alongside that narrative or those themes, KING also explores the notion of groups of men when they get together and the power structures within that, and how they can affect a male that is a bit different, who is more effeminate or shows tenderness towards another man, or whatever. It touches on both of those elements, which then play out together in the work,” Parker explains.
A triple-threat joins KING
KING is already enriched by the presence of Bulgarian composer, artist, singer/songwriter and queer activist Ivo Dimchev – currently Artist in Residence at New York’s La MaMa Theatre – who was originally commissioned to compose the original score for KING, and who has subsequently performed live at the production’s 2019 Sydney premiere and every presentation of the work for six years to date.
Joining the company for the Belgrade season of KING is celebrated queer Australian actor, dancer and singer-songwriter Keiynan Lonsdale, whose career to date has included the ABC series Dance Academy and high-profile US acting roles in 20th Century Fox’s Love, Simon (2018), US TV series The Flash and the Lionsgate film, My Fake Boyfriend.
On Parker’s radar for several years, Lonsdale has maintained a strong dance practice for more than two decades, while more recently establishing himself as a recording artist with tracks such as ‘Kiss the Boy‘ (2018), ‘Gay Street Fighter‘ (from the 2020 album Rainbow Boy) and the 2023 album Heart Defence Mixtape.
“I’ve always known Keiynan as a dancer in Sydney; he started off as a dancer and then obviously got into acting and got swept off to Hollywood, you know? I saw him and his boyfriend at a couple of opening nights of Sydney Dance Company and I thought, ‘He’s really loving the dance, he must miss it.’ And then he came to see KING at Sydney World Pride in 2023,” says Parker.
“I saw him again later, and he said, ‘I’ve got the program of KING and I’ve cut it up and I’ve stuck the pictures on my wall at home in the studio.’ Isn’t that cute, all the beautiful photos from the show?”
Conversations followed, dates aligned, and Parker soon invited Lonsdale to attend workshops with the company and audition for KING.
“He was really worried, ‘Oh, how will I keep up with the other dancers?’ And I said, ‘No, you’ve got it, because I’ve seen you dance,’ and he’s done all of that hip-hop and training where they learn a lot of choreography, and KING is very articulated choreography. And I said, ‘You’ll be able to do it. It’ll take you a while, because it’s a big thing being pushed in the deep end again, but I know you can do it.’
“So he’s in it and he’s exactly as I thought. He’s picking it up. We did three days’ rehearsal last week … and we start again this Monday [17 February], and he’s doing really, really well. His eyes are popping out of his head, and he’s just loving it… We’re really lucky to have him, because he was able to fit it in his schedule… So that’s really exciting,” Parker says.
Belgrade and beyond
KING has already had sold-out seasons at major festivals and venues in Austria, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Palestine and Australia. After its Belgrade Dance Festival season, Shaun Parker and Company will then travel on to DonauKizz Festival in Ulm, Germany, where the ensemble will perform extracts from an earlier work, Found Objects.
Additional show dates in Japan are currently under discussion before Shaun Parker and Company return home to Sydney, with further, high-profile, international tour contracts in negotiation for 2026.
Parker is especially excited to be invited back to perform at Belgrade Dance Festival. “It may not have the money that ImPulsTanz in Vienna has, but it’s an incredible festival dedicated purely to dance. [Festival founder and director] Aja Jung is an ex-ballerina who’s now started this festival on her own, and it’s just blossomed and grown,” he tells ArtsHub.
“And you have to remember, Serbia is still a recovering country from the war in the 90s and Aja has done an incredible job. Pina Bausch’s company [Tanztheater Wuppertal] has been there, Akram Khan, Hofesh Shechter, Paris Opera Ballet, Sydney Dance Company were there last year… All of the world’s leading dance companies have performed there.”
Read: Stephen Page and William Barton collaborate for Sydney Dance Company’s 2025 season
Parker is particularly impressed by Belgrade Dance Festival’s “culture – they love to build on an artist’s career”.
He continues: “Aja saw Happy as Larry at Sadler’s Wells in London, when we did it there in 2011 and said, ‘We must have it.’ So in 2014 we went to Belgrade with Happy as Larry and since then she’s followed my work, and she was really interested in Am I, which we did at the Opera House [in 2014] and that was a big show – it had 20 people on the tour – and we couldn’t quite fit that in and make it happen with the dates and everything, but then she saw KING, and now we’re doing KING there, which is amazing.
“So that’s a 10- to 11-year process, and she’s followed my choreographic vision all the way through. I love that about Europe… It’s a different culture. They actually build on the legacy of a choreographer, rather than the choreographer being a disposable entity or a commodity,” Parker says.
“And sometimes, some of the Europeans may see France, Switzerland, Germany or whatever as the epicentre of art – but these countries like Bulgaria and Serbia, I just love what they’re doing, and they’re trying to make it happen on their own terms,” he concludes.
Shaun Parker and Company’s KING plays Belgrade Dance Festival on 25-26 March 2025.
