Gideon Obarzanek

Gideon Obarzanek is an Australian choreographer, director and curator born in Melbourne in 1966. He spent part of his early childhood on a kibbutz in Israel before returning to Australia, where he entered the Australian Ballet School and made his first choreography in 1987. His early professional life connected dancing and devising closely: he danced with Queensland Ballet and created *Mr Crowther and the Wallflower* in 1989, then joined Sydney Dance Company and made *Sleep No More* in 1991 before working independently. This trajectory matters because his choreographic voice grew directly from ballet training and performance experience, not in isolation from it.

In 1995, Obarzanek and executive producer Angharad Wynne-Jones founded Chunky Move. The company began in Sydney, later moved to Melbourne, and adopted a project-based model that encouraged changing artistic teams rather than a fixed ensemble. Obarzanek served as artistic director and chief executive until 2012, developing work across theatres, installations, sites, film and participatory settings. Several Chunky Move works tested how live bodies could coexist with responsive systems. *Glow*, created with interactive software designer Frieder Weiss, joined choreography to interactive software; *Mortal Engine* extended that inquiry through movement-triggered projections, sound, laser and video. *Tense Dave*, made with co-creators Lucy Guerin and Michael Kantor, placed dance in a revolving sequence of rooms and earned a New York Dance and Performance Award.

After leaving Chunky Move, Obarzanek continued to cross dance, theatre and screen. He created *There's Definitely a Prince Involved* for The Australian Ballet, collaborated with filmmaker Matthew Bate on *I Want to Dance Better at Parties*—which won the Sydney Film Festival Dendy Award for best Australian short film—and made *L'Chaim!* for Sydney Dance Company and the virtual-reality film *Stuck in the Middle with You*. In 2017 he co-choreographed *Attractor* with Lucy Guerin for a production led by Dancenorth and Lucy Guerin Inc. His institutional work expanded to include curatorial and leadership roles with Melbourne Festival, Asia TOPA, Melbourne Fringe, the University of Melbourne and RISING. In 2026 he directed the inaugural Australian Dance Biennale within RISING and presented a revival of *Glow*, returning a landmark work to a new generation while crediting software creator Frieder Weiss.