By arts editor HELEN MUSA

Are cake and dancing mutually exclusive?

Not if you’re Canberra dance artist, Pilates practitioner and co-director of Mirramu Creative Arts Centre, Vivienne Rogis, whose one-woman dance work, The Whole Cake, is returning a decade after its original premiere, newly reimagined for Canberra.

Rogis, first created the work in Victoria in 2016. At the time, her children were 10 and 7 and were regularly dragged along to rehearsals and photo shoots. Now, at 20 and 17, they are not quite so present in the room, she says.

Rogis has since returned to the ACT, where she had long been part of the dance scene, and is enjoying being back. Luckily, her husband is a Canberra boy too.

The new Whole Cake has a literal element. Rogis will dance while audiences sit around tables and, between the dances, eat cakes created to reflect different aspects of life.

Rogis runs her Pilates business from premises in Scullin, next door to Sweet Bones Bakery and Café, so she approached pastry creator Sascha about collaborating on the project. They began a series of meetings to develop six cakes to accompany six dance vignettes.

“I’ll be dancing while you guys are seated,” Rogis says. “It’s a kind of storytelling in dance, with a separate dance for each cake. It’s like pairing the wines with each course.”

Among them is the Cake of Love, a dark chocolate vegan mousse with a biscuit base.

“Love is not saccharine sweet,” Rogis says. “It’s a nourishing thing.”

The original work was intended to tour and develop further, but life intervened. Rogis describes the planned touring as “one bite of one slice of one cake that got left on the plate for later”.

“And now it is later. Ten years later.”

For the new production, Rogis has spent months gathering stories and creating dance vignettes around the complexities of women’s lives. The result reflects both the passage of time and the fact that the past remains part of the present.

“To keep the show as ‘real life’ as it was ten years ago, I must perform the present,” she says. “But the now includes the then. It is still in my body. It is still relevant.”

The audience will be seated in a semicircle around Rogis, creating an intimate performance suited to small venues and local halls.

And – she couldn’t resist this quip – the show will demonstrate just what it means to have your cake and eat it too.

The Whole Cake, Hall Pavilion, opposite 21 Gladstone Street, Hall, September 27; Badimara Scout Hall, 198 Badimara Street, Fisher, October 4, two performances on each day. Bookings and details here.

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