A new, raw and comically entertaining performance, where the Wild West meets contemporary dance.
The crown you wear that confirms the self, is buried in a place which works to contain you rather than free you. Identity is dead. What crown do you wear?
The world is very good at telling you who you are, and sometimes so are you. Modern Day Cowgirl challenges stereotypes, identity and introspection of the self. Through examining this stereotypical Cowgirl, we are forced to question our own image, brand or labels. Do we stay contained within a limited version of ourselves or break our own moulds which we inevitably fall into?
Cowgirl will traverse external and internal landscapes where her desert reveals the ever widening expansion of her mind constantly changing and shedding towards a metamorphic ego death. Cowgirl could not tell what nature had performed. Was it a baptism or a funeral? Was it her beginning or her end? Or are neither and both true like the desert, like Cowgirl, who is everywhere and nowhere. Where her final form never reaches its stop.
This one woman show is performed and choreographed by FRINGE WORLD Weekly Award Winner, Rebecca Thomas, bringing something new, raw and comically entertaining where the Wild West meets contemporary dance. Modern Day Cowgirl is a marker of belonging and questions the value we place on reputation. It’s time to step into the desert to continue unstitching, stripping and reconfiguring the soul.
Rebecca Thomas is a regionally based dancer and choreographer and a graduate from the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) with a Bachelor of Arts in Dance in 2024. Bec grew up on Wurundjeri land in the Macedon Ranges, Victoria now working between Naarm and the Macedon Ranges. Bec is involved in the regional arts sector working closely with the youth as a dance teacher, volunteering at the Castlemaine Festival and has other projects seeding in rural Victoria.
Bec has produced, choreographed and performed in, Grass with a Capital “G” at FRINGE WORLD Perth which won a Weekly Award. Her new work Modern Day Cowgirl has been supported by Performing Lines Victoria in their Circus and Physical Theatre Residency in April 2025 and a short excerpt was presented at the Outset Choreography Awards in September 2025. Other performance opportunities include Hold by Lali Ayguade at the B12 Berlin Festival, July 2025 and more recently And Where’s the World Your Living in, Feb. 2026—a sold out gallery exhibition performance in response to the works of Cam Summers, choreographed and performed by Bec and Scotia Taylor.
Bec’s artistic practise largely involves inhabiting the subconscious mind through dance improvisation, creative writing and drawing. Her choreographic practice lives in the liminal space between identity and transformation, and between the known self and the wild unknown that dismantles it. She creates worlds that unravel the constructs we cling to: gender, ego, civilisation, control. Through evocative landscapes such as the desert, the grass, the body, her works move through cycles of death and rebirth, exposing what lies beneath the surface of selfhood and nature alike. Cinematic in tone and philosophical in spirit, her works aspire to operate as living poems. They invite the audience not to watch from afar, but to reckon with their own identity, mortality, and belonging.
