September 2025

Choreographer: Cassidy McDermott Smith

Dancers | Collaborators: Madeleine Backen, Mitchell Christie, Frances Orlina, Remy Rochester

Mentor: Rhiannon Newton

Lighting: Frankie Clarke

Producer: Anthea Doropoulos

Assistant Producer: Emma Riches

Music Credit: Tuning the wind by Grand River and The Dream by John Tejeda

Pull Me Closer imagines chaotic planetary entanglements as love stories. Personifying the planets becomes a way of contemplating our own earth’s future, asking what happens when worlds collide and when things fall out of balance.

Pathways are described through the truths of astrophysics, and simulations unfold where bodies are offered another chance to play out their positions in the universe. Mapping the rifts of imbalance, the ruthlessness of gravity, the tenderness of orbit.

The work asks what we might learn from the planets if we could share their consciousness, bringing a sense of scale to what we know: planets as lives, and deep time distilled into something we can feel the weight of.