Rinse: Amrita Hepi’s show about beginnings is a mid-career masterpiece

Zan Wimberley In the beginning, there is a stage: glowing lilac with fluorescent floor lights downstage and upstage, four blue blocks and one silver wedge.

A figure appears: an Auslan interpreter, who signs the recorded Acknowledgement of Country.

We are on Gadigal land.

Another figure appears: Bundjalung (Australia) and Ngāpuhi (Aotearoa New Zealand) dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi – co-creator and performer of Rinse, making its Sydney Opera House debut after showing at Performance Space in 2022.

Hepi regards the audience with a steady gaze.

“In the beginning,” she intones, there was emptiness which is not to be confused with nothingness.

She starts walking backwards in circles, hinting at the show’s temporality: we are going back to the start but also in spirals.

A monologue about beginnings In the beginning, in the beginning, in the beginning – the phrase is repeated approximately 20 times in Rinse.

Indeed, Hepi’s hour-long monologue could be described as a litany of starts, commencements and creations.

There are profound beginnings: the procreating Māori gods Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatūānuku, the earth mother.

There are profane beginnings: for in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was delivered by a dancer hoicking up a gummy bear.

There are banal beginnings: reminders to preheat the oven before roasting a chicken, delivered in the overly familiar tones of an influencer.

There are shocking beginnings, such as when an egg – which may or may not have come before the chicken – is smashed.

There are funny beginnings: unlikely meet-cutes, told in a rush and with a touch of vocal fry.