Rebecca Jensen
Marking Out

In the culture of professional wrestling, a ‘mark’ is an enthusiast who cannot distinguish scripted narrative from reality, accepting the staged spectacle as genuine and taking what the opponents are ‘selling’ as truth. In dance rehearsals, to ‘mark’ refers to a performer’s deliberate choice to execute movements with reduced intensity, prioritising timing, spacing and memorising over full exertion. While one mark focuses on the audience’s perception and the outward performativity of the practitioner, the other considers a performer’s economy of effort, both definitions meeting at a threshold between performance and reality—a line that is pushed, pulled and crossed.

Marking Out is the first solo exhibition by choreographer Rebecca Jensen. Through video, live performance, and material interventions, the exhibition turns its gaze to behind-the-scenes processes and turns them inside out, playing with belief, performativity, effort and labour.

Rebecca Jensen is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, born in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and based in Naarm melbourne. Her work ranges in scale and medium, including performance for theatres, galleries, and unconventional spaces, alongside participatory projects, community events, and video. Jensen’s low-fi, process-driven practice focuses on the interdisciplinary potential of choreography. She works through dance, utilising it’s speculative and practical qualities to encourage reflection, connection and transformation.

Jensen has presented work in festivals including Nelson Arts Festival, New Zealand (2024); Tempo Dance Festival, Auckland, New Zealand (2019); Frame: a biennale of dance, Naam Melbourne (2023); Keir Choreographic Award, Carriageworks, Sydney (2016, 2022); Front Beach Back Beach, Mornington Peninsula (2022); Contact High, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm Melbourne (2021) and Pageant, New York (2025); College Dance, La Biennale di Venezia, 2018; and Dance Massive, Naarm Melbourne (2015, 2017).

Her long-term collaboration with Sarah Aiken includes a suite of eco-horror works. Together they direct participatory dance project Deep Soulful Sweats which has been presented in numerous iterations across Australia and internationally since 2013. Jensen is influenced by her extensive history working as a performer with choreographers including Jo Lloyd, Lucy Guerin Inc, Shelley Lasica, Harrison Ritchie Jones, Lee Serle and Adam Linder. Alongside this, her teaching work is an integral part of her practice and feeds her enduring interests in the body and researching how movement is embodied, transmitted, and cited. She was a DanceWEB scholar in 2015; Creative Council Cité Internationale des Arts resident in 2020; and Resident Director of Lucy Guerin Inc in 2023.