He studied psychology and social work at Melbourne University and after graduating began his dancing career in New Zealand, initially as a dancer but later also as a choreographer.
These verbatim-dance works deal with contemporary issues: religious tolerance and intolerance towards sexuality in To Be Straight With You (2007–09), censorship and freedom of speech in Can we Talk About This?
[5] By 1986, Newson had worked with 28 different choreographers and was beginning to feel increasingly frustrated by lack of subject matter within the British contemporary dance scene.
Since its inception, the company has been characterised by work that incorporates a range of mediums, including elements of theatre, dance, film and text.
Initially conceived with students at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), the piece was remounted and toured the UK at the end of 1987.
[14] Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men followed in 1988, and drew inspiration from the book Killing for Company, written about the mass-murderer Dennis Nielsen.
[15] In 1990, the work was adapted for film with the director David Hinton and went on to be awarded as The Best Stage Performance Reworked for the Camera by IMZ Dance Screen.
The work was inspired by Bertrand Russell’s writings on happiness, and much like Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, the production was critically acclaimed, winning the Golden Pegasus Award at 1990's Melbourne International Festival.
Set in a typical British pub, it looks at how a group of men hide actions and feelings that are deemed unmanly, only for these repressed emotions to manifest themselves in other ways.
[22] A new production of Enter Achilles, in collaboration with Ballet Rambert and Sadler's Wells, staged its world premiere at the Adelaide Festival in March 2020.
It opened London's Dance Umbrella season,[27] and featured 17 performers investigating how society measures success and how we in turn calculate our own value.
In the same year, Tate Modern commissioned a reimagined version of the show Living Costs marking Newson's first site specific work for DV8.
It won 18 prizes, including the NOW Audience Choice Award at the Moving Pictures Festival of Toronto,[3] and the Rose d'Or for Arts & Specials in 2005.
The piece toured widely between 2007 and 2009, and was critically praised for its 'hard hitting' nature, and desire to tackle difficult subject matters head on.
For this production, Newson drew on existing interviews as well as ones he conducted himself, concerning events such as the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the burnings of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.
Newson's most recent work, again using the methods of verbatim theatre, is JOHN (2014), which follows one man (the eponymous title character, played by performer Hannes Langolf) tracing his criminality, drug use and personal relationships, efforts at rehabilitation and desire to lead an ordinary life.
[36] On 12 January 2016, as DV8 celebrated its 30th anniversary, the company announced that artistic director Lloyd Newson was taking time out to reflect about the future.