I am interested in creating intimate, emotionally captivating performance works – that places the moving body at the centre of meaning-making. I am interested in the body as both an archive and a site of transformation: a place where memory, grief, desire, rupture and resilience can be held and reimagined in news stories.

For more than 22 years, I have developed an approach to directing, choreography and performer training that brings rigorous physical practice into conversation with deep emotional and imaginative inquiry. I create conditions in which performers can work with agency, curiosity and self-determination, generating material from their own embodied knowledge rather than simply illustrating predetermined ideas.

“Samantha Chester’s mysterious, superbly executed and ineffably sad The Astronaut.”
— David Zampatti, The West Australian ★★★★½

Working across text-based and devised performance, I explore the unstable, generative relationship between movement and language. I am drawn to what emerges when language reaches its limits: the physical trace of an event that cannot be fully explained. Movement becomes a form of testimony—capable of articulating complex internal states, shared histories and the often-unspoken dimensions of human experience.

I want to invite audiences to encounter the body not as an object to be viewed, but as a living, feeling and resilient field of knowledge.