Australian
and international
exploratory
performance and
media arts

March 2013

WeTubeLIVE, Ben Speth, Dance Massive 2013

photo Rachel Roberts

WeTubeLIVE, Ben Speth, Dance Massive 2013

THE CITATION OF SO-CALLED PEDESTRIAN MOVEMENT IN POSTMODERN DANCE HAS BEEN INTERPRETED IN MANY WAYS, ONE OF WHICH SEES THE USE OF THE QUOTIDIAN IN DANCE AS AN ATTEMPT TO DECONSTRUCT NOTIONS OF VIRTUOSITY AND SPECTACLE.

WeTube LIVE offers another way to rethink the values of dance performance. Where Steve Paxton’s Satisfying Lover (1967) offered a series of ordinary bodies walking, standing and sitting, WeTube LIVE opens up another kind of space, framed in the context of the electronic everyday.

The Great Hall of Victoria’s National Gallery is vast, its Leonard French ceiling a coloured relief from vast walls of grey brick. The room is full of young people, each consumed by a particular activity performed and contained within white squares. The difference between them is marked but they are united through a sense of commitment to their task. The diversity of these performative tasks exists within a score: to source the performance material from YouTube.

The audience flows around the squares, a mass promenade, pausing then moving on at a uniform pace. At a certain point, the performers melt away and line up along the length of the wall. We are now the choreography. They watch us, then the cellular activity begins again and the promenade resumes.

Some performers have selected dance sequences or hip hop, another copied a Beyoncé routine, another executed a makeup ritual. Several performances contained an element of critique, whether through displacement, parody or exaggeration. One young woman performed a charming mittel European folk dance—in costume—another confined himself to a cardboard box.

WeTubeLIVE, Ben Speth, Dance Massive 2013

photo Rachel Roberts

WeTubeLIVE, Ben Speth, Dance Massive 2013

What struck me was the confidence of the group, many of whom are teenagers or young adults, inviting being seen very close up. The close proximity of the viewing experience engenders a certain dialogue between the watcher and performer. I feel that I am meeting these people, encountering something about them which is at the same time mediated.

A great deal of cultural theory suggests that identity comes from outside the self but is solidified through what the body does in a performative sense. In general, this is thought to be an unconscious process. We think and feel our identity as internal and intimate, not the product of social forces. WeTubeLIVE differs on this point, or at least troubles the distinction between outer and inner inasmuch as the range of choices is very much part of popular culture but, once made, the choice becomes a mode of enactive agency.

Viewed through the lens of community dance, WeTubeLIVE is a mode of group participation, individual expression and serial observation. Its form of community is two-fold, formed between those present in the Great Hall but also the virtual community of YouTube watchers. Normally we send each other links. In this instance, the links are a daisy chain of live actions.

The affective impact of WeTubeLIVE was a positive feeling about these young people and their choices. This is different (and complementary) to the darker thoughts explored in many of the Dance Massive pieces, achieved through foregrounding agency and participation rather than critique through representation. In that sense, WeTubeLIVE is a utopian gesture, a mode of agency ‘Gangnam-style.’

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Dance Massive: WeTubeLIVE, concept, direction Ben Speth, project manager Bec Reid, dance facilitator Adam Wheeler; The Great Hall, National Gallery of Victroria, March 24

Alisdair Macindoe, Dual

photo Ponch Hawkes

Alisdair Macindoe, Dual

IN A MERE SEVERAL DECADES, THE CHOREOGRAPHER HAS EVOLVED INTO THE DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER, COLLABORATING WITH COMPUTER SPECIALISTS, TECHNICIANS, VIDEO AND SOUND ARTISTS, THEORISTS AND UNUSUAL SPECIALISTS LIKE ROBOTICISTS. OFTEN THEY SHARE THE MAKING WITH THEIR DANCERS—WHO HAVE, IN PARALLEL, EVOLVED INTO EXPONENTS OF STYLES OF BEING, DANCING, ACTING, SPEAKING AND SINGING AS REQUIRED.

These developments haven’t been sudden nor have they been solely of a kind felt by dance. The emergence of contemporary performance of the 1970s and 80s signalled the fruitful bringing together of hitherto largely discrete forms. Here, movement played a significant role, texts were projected or intoned, conventional playwriting eschewed, design was no longer background or setting but a creation in itself, sound was no longer played in the intervals between words, and the application of new technologies could find room to move. Dance, more than theatre ever has, embodied or took on this opening out and became a leader in exploring the potential of digital technologies in the late 90s into the 2000s.

This process of hybridisation is still playing out, not so much creating new forms as mutating existing ones: a dance work is still a dance work but the manner of its framing and the ways in which it engages its audiences are changing, offering experiential intensity. We can still witness the movement of Russell Dumas’ dancers as simply dance in and of itself, without a sound score or elaborate costuming and lighting. Some works indicate a focus on the dancer’s movements with aural close-ups, amplifying the sounds made by the breathing, stressed body or its impact on surfaces. These and other works play with our senses and heighten the feeling of immersive proximity.

The programming of Dance Massive 2013, a small but telling slice of Australian dance, has revealed that contemporary dance is as engaged as ever with the nature of the theatrical experience, pushing further and further into immersion, perceptual play and the production as performative installation.

installed

More or Less Concrete, Tim Darbyshire

photo Ponch Hawkes

More or Less Concrete, Tim Darbyshire

Dance Massive 2013 included a significant number of productions that could be regarded in some senses as much dance installations as they were timed performances. Antony Hamilton’s Black Project 1, Tim Darbyshire’s More or Less Concrete, Ashley Dyer’s Life Support, Anouk van Dijk’s 247 Days, Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals, Stephanie Lake’s Dual and Lee Serle’s P.O.V. each comprised design/technology activated/inhabited by performers and sometimes audiences.

Sounds actual, amplified and treated made by dancers in More or Less Concrete and Physical Fractals filled the aural space about us, as did sounds of popping smoke-ring machines in Life Support with increasing intensity as smoke filled a diminishing auditorium. In More or Less Concrete the miked breathing, coughing, gasping and thumping of performers’ bodies mutated from the real into surreal soundscapes for its headphoned audience. In Physical Fractals, framed with light, four pairs of microphones angled close to the floor set the physical and aural parameters of the dance with the speed, beat and bounce of the taut choreography. Two microphones are swung over our heads mid-show, making us, and the very air around us, part of an installation. In Dual the rectangle on which the dance unfolds is just one plane of an aural space in which sounds sweep by and at us, and we hear three variations of the score, making the space at once aurally familiar and strange (in its permutations).

P.O.V, Lee Serle

photo Ponch Hawkes

P.O.V, Lee Serle

In P.O.V. the audience is invited to sit in a grid of swivel stools, such that the dancers course down rows and cross intersections and the viewers can turn to follow them. Those of us outside the frame watch the dance of audience movement and admire the precision of the speeding and lunging dancers, their peripheral vision making themselves and the audience safe in the narrow aisles. This dance installation can be experienced from inside or out. Ben Speth’s WeTube LIVE inverts the P.O.V. grid: here it’s the performers in fixed rows with the audience roaming among them, but working on the same principle of playing with perspective and subjective point of view.

Tony Osborne, Life Support, Ashley Dyer

photo Rachel Roberts

Tony Osborne, Life Support, Ashley Dyer

Life Support proved to be more installation than movement work. The rings, waves and falls of smoke do the dancing while a performer executing a set of simple, quite abstract gestures (as if refusing to make thematic comment) plays potential sacrificial victim to an audience acting as possible executioner à la the infamous Milgram Experiment (we can vote to release the performer from a box filled with smoke; or not). In the program, the onstage operators of the smoke machines are credited as performers: Life Support is a machine in which we are trapped as a wall closes in and smoke pours over us. We are given oxygen cannisters should we feel short of breath. Although Life Support is ultimately unthreatening, there are moments when the otherwise complicit imagination unwillingly conjures darker visions of fires, gas chambers, dust storms and other asphyxiators.

Black Project 1 is not simply danced, it is installation-cum-dance. It has the powerful appeal of experiencing visual art in the making as two strange graffiti-ists strip a wall to make large scale patterns of white against sombre shades of black and the sheen of the makers’ charcoal skins.

sensed

Lauren Langlois, 247 days, Chunky Move

photo Jeff Busby

Lauren Langlois, 247 days, Chunky Move

The pleasure of dance resides in the privilege of watching skilled movers who are exemplars of capacities flexible, anti-gravitational and richly suggestive. The dancing body is more often than not framed with set, costume, light and sound, focusing and amplifying our sense of the movement, expressly foregrounding it. However more and more works play with the senses of the audience, expanding perspectives on dance in which the dancer is integrated into the design by means lo-tech and high (think of Gideon Obarzanek’s Mortal Engine, among many others). In Black Project 1 the painterly merging of bodies and environment and the tonal gradings with which it is executed are visually engrossing.

The design for 247 Days is a curved wall of mirrors that reflects, multiplies and even disappears the dancers. The wall opens to form doors and more reflections, providing sensory pleasures and thematic complexity. No mere background, this vast mirror is integrated with the dancing and is operated by the performers.

Choreographers happily, and meaningfully, played with our perceptions in this Dance Massive. In extreme cases our visual field was limited by low lighting levels such that we often had to adjust to make sense of what we were seeing. Correlative or contrasting movement is as important as light in these works: the alternation of stillness and rapid movement in Black Project 1; the sheer slowness and odd body shapings in More or Less Concrete; the brush strokes of movement in moments of ultra-low light in Physical Fractals.

Matthew Day’s Intermission offers a very special kind of immersion, our attention locked in synch with the waves of vibration that consume the dancer’s body while our ears buzz and hum with the broad counterpoint provided by James Brown’s score. Our appreciation of Day’s movement is an extension of what we feel for any dancer who engages us, but the minimalist repetition and variation make for a distinctively intense experience.

hybridised

Dalisa Pigram, Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku

photo Ponch Hawkes

Dalisa Pigram, Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku

Lucy Guerin Inc and Belvoir’s Conversation Piece, Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr, and Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body synthesise forms of performance. Guerin brings together three dancers, three actors, improvisation, choreography and sound technology to create an aesthetically dense account of how we deploy language as power. In Guddir, Gudirr, a high point in Dance Massive, Dalisa Pigram is at once dancer, actor and physical theatre performer and always herself, addressing us directly, a powerful presence and superb artist in the only work in this dance event that deals with actual lives, personally and politically (although Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body also carries some political punch).

Skeleton is the creation of a choreographer, Larissa McGowan, working with a theatre director, Sam Haren. Lo-tech stage wizardry and high-speed dance generate a world of brutal ephemerality where accidents and nostalgia uncomfortably co-exist. Skeleton’s constant choreographic content and pulse prevents it from being labelled dance theatre, but it does have a clarity of purpose and design, not least in its use of objects (skateboard, BMX bike, headphones, baseball bat) that incline it to that form without disadvantage and with increased thematic coherence (although my fellow writer Carl Nilsson-Polias thought the work underdeveloped). Jo Lloyd’s Future Perfect has some kinship with Skeleton’s structural-thematic approach: it too deploys propulsive, finely realised choreography and ends in dissolution.

Atlanta Eke, Monster Body

photo Rachel Roberts

Atlanta Eke, Monster Body

Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body is a loose hybrid of dance, contemporary performance and performance art, a series of strong images with broad thematic unanimity and no obvious development. Work of this kind was abundant in the 1980s and 90s, but it’s refreshing to see its emergence in the form of an idiosyncratic, brave and engaging performer as well as occurring at a moment when the feminine and feminism are once again in focus.

Some of the show’s images are overwrought—the cute animal-headed figure posing sexily to the repeated roar of a motorcycle promptly empties itself of significance—or too awkwardly realised—when Eke fills her rubber body suit with water-filled balloons to become multi-breasted, the image is muddled. These contrast with scenes more adroitly and powerfully realised, including Monster Body’s most potent image—the naked Eke growling and howling with superb vocal control while executing precise dance steps. Nothing else in the performance was as strange or monstrous as this.

futured

Tobiah Booth-Remmers, Lisa Griffiths, Lewis Rankin, Skeleton

photo Chris Herzfeld, Camlight Productions

Tobiah Booth-Remmers, Lisa Griffiths, Lewis Rankin, Skeleton

Eke, like Lake, Hamilton, Pigram, Day, Darbyshire, Serle, McGowan, Lloyd and Abbott collectively suggest through their creations an adventurous and diverse future for Australian dance in which audiences are regarded by choreographer-directors as sensory beings open to an enlarged view of dance as not only an integral part of the greater realm of performance but of dance as an instigator of intelligent investigation and innovation.

questioned

There are questions to be asked, for example about a certain sameness among space-eating sound scores, however dextrously and ingeniously they have been realised (see Gail Priest’s overview). As well, there’s the dance language itself, dominated by hyper-fluency and style melding that allows little time or space for reflective movement, with only a few exceptions. Antony Hamilton, Jo Lloyd, Stephanie Lake, Anouk van Dijk and Natalie Abbotts’ hyperactive subjects contrast sharply with Russell Dumas’ and Tim Darbyshire’s slowly evolving formations, while Matthew Day hovers between, moving in grand slow arcs while vibrating at speed. This is not to deny the rich diversity of choreographic approaches in the first group and the intricacies realised by their skilful dancers. As for ideas, Dance Massive was full of them, from the overtly political and cultural to speculations on ritual and worship, art-making, accidents, the self, relationships, mutability, the city and the future.

Dance Massive once again proved a deeply satisfying experience for audiences and for bringing together many of the dance community. As for its other function, the selling of Australian work to overseas presenters, outcomes are as yet unknown although there were apparently some promising signs.

Now that Spring Dance has been dropped by the Sydney Opera House, Dance Massive is the only substantial dance event for what are for the most part independent Australian contemporary dance makers, although it’s hoped that the MoveMe Dance Festival (see review) presented by STRUT and Ausdance WA in Perth might grow in scale and reach to bolster national dance culture. (It would be misleading to suggest that Spring Dance did a great deal for Australian dance, but it did develop an audience—but apparently not a big enough one despite press release rhetoric about record attendance numbers.) I hope that Dance Massive, with its doubtless limited resources but committed host venues, can continue to offer artists and audiences the opportunity to see and celebrate significant work, especially from the kind of emerging talent on show this year. It would be even more satisfying if more interstate artists could become part of Dance Massive (the numbers have varied event to event and there are many variables involved, cost not the least among them). In an era of increasing ephemerality, the need for Dance Massive is great. Long may it prosper.

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Arts House, Dance House, Malthouse, Dance Massive 2013, Melbourne, March 12-24

RealTime issue #114 April-May 2013 pg. 26

Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc

photo Ponch Hawkes

Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc

IT’S ALREADY BEEN NOTED IN SEVERAL OF OUR REVIEWS THAT MANY OF THE SOUNDTRACKS FOR SHOWS IN DANCE MASSIVE HAVE THEMSELVES BEEN MASSIVE. ALONG WITH SMOKE, STROBING LIGHTS AND NUDITY, SEVERAL SHOWS HAVE ALSO FOREWARNED THEIR AUDIENCE OF “LOUD MUSIC.”

These days the ubiquity of digital audio processing software makes it relatively quick and easy for the solo composer to create epic, symphonic pieces and dance has become the seeding ground for a kind of new electronic baroque. Often these soundtracks are masterful, but after seeing so many works in quick succession it is refreshing to experience collaborations between choreographers and composers or sound artists that attempt more subtle, conceptual and nuanced modes. An interesting anomaly in Dance Massive 2013 was the strange flashback to the days when composers were too expensive and choreographers cobbled together pre-made commercial tracks for their design. And why not—just to mix things up a little?

nostalgia for the signified

In Conversation Piece (which I saw in Sydney, not in its Dance Massive version) Lucy Guerin’s inclusion of songs such as Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ “Mercy Seat” performed by Johnny Cash or The Cure’s “A Forest,” seems pragmatic and devoid of irony. They are used to accompany the buoyant dances that curiously rupture the otherwise text-driven work and are clearly a “cheat”—they get us to where we need to go emotionally and atmospherically via their well established associations. However Guerin keeps things edgy, utilising the considerable skills of Robin Fox as sound designer to shift Conversation Piece towards darker places. The true complexity of the sound design is in the seamless manipulation of the iPhone technology as a multipurpose tool (as Apple has always wanted us to believe). The addition of the Garage Band rendition of Kylie Minogue’s “Come Into My World” (composed by Cathy Dennis and Robert Davis) is a stroke of quirky brilliance and serves to thematically integrate the idea of inner and outer worlds, personal and public soundtracks.

Monster Body, Atlanta Eke

photo Rachel Roberts

Monster Body, Atlanta Eke

In Monster Body, Atlanta Eke uses the most mainstream of commercial tracks, subverting them through that old postmodern strategy of juxtaposition. Britney Spears pipes “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman” while a naked Eke releases an arc of urine onto the floor. To Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls)” Eke is joined by six other naked women of various body shapes to crump, jiggle and wobble very precisely through the grotesqueries of sexualised R&B dancing. Even the use of Ligeti (via Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) hints at irony—the female body as cosmic unknown. In an over extended sequence, Eke parades in a body suit full of water balloons at the same time subjecting us to a relentless loop of revving motorbike engine—machismo at its sonic finest. In Monster Body, the music and sonic material hold the meaning in relation to which Eke’s body ventures definition.

haunted weather

Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1

photo Ponch Hawkes

Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, Black Project 1

Discussing his approach to musical structure, John Cage said he sought to move “away from an object having parts into what you might call weather” (Composition in Retrospect, 1993). Antony Hamilton’s sound compilation for Black Projects 1—a series of tracks by European masters of electronic glitchy ambient Robert Henke, Mika Vainio and Fennesz—perfectly exemplifies this idea. This is not just because the soundscape consists of rolling waves of digital thunder and electronic static but rather that the music creates a space for the dancers (Melanie Lane and Hamilton) to simply inhabit. It is soundscape as landscape, not soundtrack, and it works well, allowing us to be drawn into the post-apocalyptic world while leaving space for the dancers’ actions to further shape and define it.

In Black Projects 2, however, the score, composed by Alisdair Macindoe (also a very fine dancer in Stephanie Lake and Lucy Guerin’s works), offers the complete opposite. Here the dancers are dictated to by the pulsing beats, as a six-headed creature shape-shifts and osmoses leading to a final holy cosmic epiphany. While well-produced and cinematic, the soundtrack offers little mystery, letting the dancers and us know where we are up to at all times.

big, bigger, biggest

Future Perfect, Jo Lloyd

photo Ponch Hawkes

Future Perfect, Jo Lloyd

Experienced on the first night of Dance Massive, Macindoe’s score indicated a trend in the many scores that followed. Perhaps paralleling the “loudness war” in commercial music production, it seems that many of the choreographers and their sound collaborators feel the need to make things bigger—more volume, more layers, more crescendos, more speakers. Siding with the critics of the loudness war, I wonder if something is lost in the process. I don’t just mean hearing (though that’s sometimes a possibility) nor even the crest or trough of dramatic range, but is it possible that these epic soundtracks have the effect of diminishing the bodily presence? Buffeted and propelled as it is by sonic forces, is the body losing its own agency, or space to be seen and read without the prompting of sonic signifiers? (Or have I been reading too much Yvonne Rainer?)

The soundtrack for Jo Lloyd’s Future Perfect by Duane Morrison feels close to subsuming the dancers and while transcendence is on the agenda, it feels a little more bullying than uplifting. Flavoured by 1980s synthesiser sounds the creators set themselves a difficult task. Starting at such a high sonic point, there’s little room for escalation either energetically or volume-wise throughout the piece.

Sandra Parker’s The Recording is an exploration of the disjunction between the body, gesture and mediatised performance, so allowing Steve Heather’s soundtrack to be bigger than the dancing is clearly a conscious choice. Composed from recordings of some of Australia’s and Europe’s leading improvising musicians, who are better known for their textural, pointillist sonorities, Heather’s score is surprisingly luscious and harmonically driven, becoming increasingly more romantic, even approaching the parodic with its Latino-lament conclusion. Does it mean that Parker succeeded in her exploration if I found the music more engaging than the physical performance?

Of course sometimes the hyperbolic soundtrack approach is perfectly apt as in Jethro Woodward’s score for Skeleton by Larissa McGowan. The work is about forces acting upon the body—both physical and cultural—and Woodward’s super energetic, highly fragmented score of smashing glass and sudden impacts mixed with computer game bleeps and cinematic howls, grunts and screams is masterfully constructed. He even allows for a quieter lyricism near the end, interestingly not paralleled by the dance which remains muscular, taut and edgy. The score is nerve janglingly relentless, yet utterly appropriate for the work.

Tara Soh, James Pham, Lauren Langlois, Leif Helland, Niharika Senapati, Alya Manzart, 247 Days, Chunky Move

Chunky Move’s 247 Days choreographed by Anouk van Dijk, a work about the highs and lows of youthful existence, is well served by the sound design by Marcel Wierckx (Canada/Netherlands). Gradually accruing detail from the almost imperceptible crackle of a vinyl record, underpinned by sustained chords, he works in live vocal elements from the miked-up dancers. Half-gasps, fragments of melody and shards of words are grabbed and effected, a bit of reverb here, digital stutter there, creating the sense of an ‘internal voice.’ The piece culminates in a choral epiphany, voices delayed, pitch-shifted and overlapped to form a massive chorus, but somehow it just doesn’t quite reach the peak to which it aspires, or perhaps it does so too rapidly. While much of the spoken text feels naïve, the more abstracted vocal play provides a cohesion to both the soundtrack and the work overall.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a vast soundtrack but perhaps what is beginning to perplex me is that the “bigger and louder is better” approach is in danger of becoming the default setting for contemporary dance, not only in the mainstream but also the independent sector. (Is this the place to mention that, one female “sound theorist” aside, all the composer/sound designers in Dance Massive were male?) While there’s no doubt that it is effective/affective, is this approach conceptually engaging?

dancing dialogues

Alisdair Macindoe, Sara Black, Dual

photo Ponch Hawkes

Alisdair Macindoe, Sara Black, Dual

For those seeking a deeper investigation into the relationship of sound and the moving body several of the smaller scale works offered the most satisfaction. Robin Fox’s sound for Stephanie Lake’s Dual is definitely of the epic loud variety; however both dance and music explore a clear structural principle—Part 1 = A, Part 2 = B, Part 3 = A+B. The correlation between action and sound develops a complexity due to the absence or rather the implied future presence of the other half of the dance and music. For example, in a section of her solo Sara Black lies face down on the floor slowly and gracefully extending her limbs while her soundtrack berates her with seemingly inappropriate harsh stabs. When the duo is complete, we see that the soundtrack at this point more clearly reflects Macindoe’s actions rather than Black’s reaction as he pulls and prods her. It’s a simple conceit but offers a fascinating depth in its execution.

Natalie Abbott, Sarah Aitken, Physical Fractals

photo Ponch Hawkes

Natalie Abbott, Sarah Aitken, Physical Fractals

Physical Fractals also worked with bare-boned simplicity, effectively marshalled by sound designer Daniel Arnot. Natalie Abbott and Sara Aitken’s rhythmic repetitions make sounds in the space which are captured by eight microphones, placed with heads hard up against the floorboards. The predominant sounds are footfalls and breaths, delayed to make rhythms which radiate out from the initial action. Sometimes the sounds of the actions are captured and continue after the bodies have ceased to move, playing with our perceptions and expectations. At one point sound becomes the dominant character of the piece as the dancers swing live microphones like lassoes just above the audience producing a ferocious roar which in some deft looping trick continues long after the dancers are still again. What is particularly refreshing is how raw and unaestheticised the sounds themselves are, the only decoration found in the beats made by delay or the ever-present hum of sound and light leads interfering with each other. While this use of action to create the sound score is not new, it’s the purity and thoroughness of this exploration, the conceptual rigour in both dance and sound design that makes this work impressive.

Tim Darbyshire’s More or Less Concrete works with a similar premise to Physical Fractals but pushes it to its ultimate conclusion. The three dancers are closely miked, every movement, mumble, rustle, breath heightened for the audience via the headphones they are invited to wear. Here sound is not so much a by-product of movement but rather the movement seems decided by the sounds they will produce. The gentle “shhhhh” of bodies against the floor, the “phhhhhhh” of bodies rubbing against each other in polyester overalls, the slap of hands hitting the floor all call for the body to form odd shapes and perform actions that are the dance itself. Only occasionally is an effect added, some reverb or ring modulation to expand an action further into the space. Where Physical Fractals achieves a symbiosis of sound and movement, More or Less Concrete creates a complete synthesis.

Finally on matters of integrated sound and action, Ashley Dyer’s Life Support (made with a long list of collaborators including Sam Pettigrew on ‘sound and objects’) also deserves a mention not so much for its integration of body and sound but rather as an inhabited sound and light installation. Above an ominous and insistent hum the smoke machines used to fill the increasingly claustrophobic space provide a utilitarian and deeply disturbing soundtrack. The sonic highlight is an all-too brief performance by a smoke ring orchestra—upturned speaker cones with buckets attached emit rough farty sounds, the vibrations sufficient to puff air for the creation of smoke rings. I would like to see/hear a whole concert of that!

festival compression

Tony Osborne, Life Support, Ashley Dyer

photo Rachel Roberts

Tony Osborne, Life Support, Ashley Dyer

Of course it’s a little unnatural to experience so many works in such a short amount of time and it can lead to unfair comparisons, but it does provide a contour map of ways in which dance and music are developing. Compared with works in Dance Massive 2011 the grand cinematic soundtrack remains a constant, but this year we see the re-introduction of the mix-tape mentality and also a shift from the live instrumentalist to the performing audio engineer which allows for in-depth explorations into concrete, less decorative sounds in space. In these latter works we see not only a rigorous investigation into the relationship of sound and the performative body, but also an extension, particularly for a more mainstream audience, of the very definitions of music. Sam Pettigrew (sound and smoke-ring master in Ashley Dyer’s Life Support) suggested to me that during festivals like this there’s a great opportunity to put on an über-gig, bringing the purely audio work of these innovative composers and sound artists to a whole new audience. One for Dance Massive 2015?

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Dance Massive 2013, Arts House, Dancehouse, Malthouse, March 12-24, 2013; http://www.dancemassive.com.au

Due to various constraints several shows in Dance Massive were not able to be addressed here: Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr, Lee Serle’s P.O.V., Matthew Day’s Intermission, Hannah Mathew’s Action/Response, and Dance Exchange’s dance for the time being – Southern Exposure.

RealTime issue #114 April-May 2013 pg. 34

WeTubeLIVE, Ben Speth, Dance Massive 2013

photo Rachel Roberts

WeTubeLIVE, Ben Speth, Dance Massive 2013

I’M IN THAT WEIRD PLACE ON YOUTUBE AGAIN. I’M LOOKING AT GRAINY FOOTAGE OF A CONCERT. THERE’S A MAN IN A RED CAPE AND VIOLINISTS IN WHAT LOOK LIKE HIJABS OR BLACK SACKS OVER THEIR HEADS. THE MAN OPENS HIS MOUTH AND SINGS IN AN UNEARTHLY FALSETTO, THE SOUND A MUSCLE-FREEZING LAMENT THAT COULD BELONG TO EITHER GENDER. WITH ONE ERRANT CLICK I GOT HERE.

YouTube is a platform where cats, screaming goats and Korean pop singers go viral, a fever that catches on and compels us to share chosen material. Often, qualities indefinable and undeserving elevate one video above the billions of others out there.

Ben Speth in his WeTubeLIVE celebrates the bizarre, the narcissistic and the occasionally talented, curating 100 live performances appropriated from YouTube. Each performer is presented in a carefully demarcated square—neat and contained with their personal effects and own sound system. The taped square works to create a barrier not unlike a computer screen; viewers walk amid performers without fear of interfering, happy to gaze and gawk as though invisible.

A girl in a green plushie outfit rolls around her square challenging, “Can you do this?” in a shrill voice while shoving her foot in her pocket. It’s an example of the truly inane attention seeking that could at any moment mushroom into a global cultural phenomenon. It seems a generation has grown up unfazed at self-promotion and self-exposition in the form of video blogs and status updates. The self is very much at the centre of all this—self-snapped photos are even called selfies.

In an online forum which appears apparently immune to government intercession and where anybody anywhere can upload a video, it is perhaps telling that videos with political intent don’t share the notoriety of the largely banal ones that capture our attention. Are there forces stymying revolutionary ideas from making it onto the recommended-for-you list or is it that we would rather watch freak shows? One video in recent memory showed young men in Palestine parody Gangnam Style while pointing a finger at the stark difference between glitzy Gangnam and the freshly bombed Gaza, complete with donkey transport and rubble. Similarly, I was heartened to see a disabled performer rocking out amongst the tiara-adorned beauty queens at WeTube. She was there; you just had to look for her.

WeTubeLIVE, Ben Speth, Dance Massive 2013

photo Rachel Roberts

WeTubeLIVE, Ben Speth, Dance Massive 2013

Many of the WeTubeLIVE performances appear to have been selected for their expressions of personal freedom rather than their storytelling qualities. Hip hop dancers, a girl with her forehead covered in bindis, her square full of talismans, and a make up tutorial are just some of the visions you can tune in and out of. Choreographed moments, when all the performers are perfectly still and silent, intimate the possibility of united action, but it’s unrealised. There have been serious attempts to harness the viral power of YouTube for change, such as the infamous Kony 2012 campaign. Before that, people were buoyed and entertained by community-sprouting flash mobs (my favourite is the dancing inmates in CPDRC, a Philippines prison). Flash mobs were a fad and Kony dissolved with the creator’s public meltdown. The potential is there, we’re just not sure how to topple governments with it; there’s silence still.

What WeTubeLIVE director Ben Speth seems to suggest is that we are still amateurs, singing into hairbrushes, only now our mirrors are laptop cameras. We’re not wielding technology for anything more than instant gratification. The performers are all young, inevitably imbuing WeTube with some sense of hope. However, as I came to a train wreck of a singer, I thought WeTubeLIVE a harsh critique of each of us for choosing the things we watch.

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Dance Massive & Ben Speth, WeTubeLIVE, concept, direction Ben Speth, project manager Bec Reid, dance facilitator Adam Wheeler; NGV International, Great Hall, Melbourne, March 24; http://dancemassive.com.au

MANY WORDS HAVE BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT WHETHER TO APPROACH ART IN TERMS OF THE WORK ALONE OR IN RELATION TO THE ARTIST. TO WHAT EXTENT DOES THE ARTWORK SPEAK FOR ITSELF, AND TO WHAT EXTENT OUGHT IT BE VIEWED THROUGH THE PERSONA OF THE ARTIST?

Retrospectives are a great way to circumvent this dilemma because we can see the life work of the person without needing to resort to biography. Life is in the works, plural.

Tracie Mitchell has produced a body of dance films spanning some 25 years. It was an inspired decision on the part of Angela Conquet, artistic director of Dancehouse, to show all these works together. Not only do they reflect a significant creative output, they offer the viewer an opportunity to flit between films, to experience their differences and to allow the experience of one to influence the other.

Predictably, the works were shown in chronological order. From a blurred three-minute ‘haiku’ (Whitehouse #1, 1985) to an extended, full colour film, the common denominator is Mitchell’s own developing eye.

Time changes everything though. Many of the performers from these films were sitting in the audience, draped over beanbags, watching their former selves onscreen. Mitchell was herself present and primed to share this greater part of her own life. So the viewing experience, quite apart from the films, was redolent with the passage of time in that Proustian sense.

Cinema is itself a succession of temporal captures, which in their serial multiplicity stage a complex choreography of movement. Beginning at the beginning, I loved watching three minutes culled from an event staged long ago. Grainy images of phrase material paced out inside an industrial building give an inkling of what’s to come.

Mitchell’s second film, Chicken (1990), is a poetic, slow motion meditation of a group performance, often watched in canon. Set in a car park overlooking railway tracks, the black and white imagery exhibits a considered construction of the viewer’s perspective. Turns and spirals, dips and kicks are played out in exuberant fashion, peppered with flashes of inner urban landscape. The poetics of the imagery arises in waves. Thread (1994) extends this notion of partial perspective, according to which the camera itself makes choices which we inherit. Sure (1998) is pretty much my favourite film, I’m not sure why. The makeup of the many female dancers is quite stark, and their looks to camera a bit contrived and yet their dancing, composure, and close relationship to the camera express a kinaesthetic empathy that is a pleasure to watch.

Whole Heart (2005) is much more narrative-based, a scary account of female vulnerability and sexual violence, which reminds us that each young woman was once a child. It contains some unaccountably beautiful images of peeling wallpaper, unravelling the patina of time. Finally there was Under the Weather (2008), a colour saturated account of women’s dreams and fears.

These films are not a trajectory leading to some end. They are each fulsome in their own right. But seeing them together was something else, an opportunity to experience a different kind of beast, crisscrossing time, courtesy of a life in the works.

Dance Massive, Dancehouse, with Keir Foundation: Tracie Mitchell, Dance Screen Retrospective 1985-2008, Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 23, 24; http://dancemassive.com.au

Choreographer Tim Darbyshire discusses his work More or Less Concrete with Keith Gallasch, presented by Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall for Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive: Arts House & Tim Darbyshire: More or Less Concrete,
choreographer Tim Darbyshire, performers: Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Josh Mu, sound Design Jem Savage, lighting Ben (Bosco) Shaw, Bluebottle, dramaturge, sound theorist Thembi Soddell, costumes Rebecca Agnew, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 20-24; dancemassive.com.au/

ATLANTA EKE’S MONSTER BODY IS A RADICAL AND BORDER-SHIFTING WORK FOR AUSTRALIAN DANCE, EVEN IF NOT SO IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT. THE ARTISTS WHOSE WORK FITS MOST CLOSELY IN THE LINEAGE OF MONSTER BODY—LA RIBOT, MATHILDE MONNIER, ANN LIV YOUNG AND YOUNG JEAN LEE—ARE RARELY IF EVER SEEN ON THESE SHORES.

But once an innovation happens, it loses its singularity in iteration. It thus cannot be appraised simply in the macho, military terms of ‘revolution,’ ‘innovation’ or ‘shock’: it becomes essayistic, formalist, a tool in a toolbox. But Monster Body is a carefully conceptualised and executed work, and loses nothing when the shock wears off. Instead, it provokes more thought, with greater clarity.

It is hard to see Monster Body without having first received warnings about its nudity, urination and feminism. On the surface, it is a confronting piece: Eke, swirling a hula hoop, greets us wearing nothing but a grotesque dinosaur mask. A series of classical ballet battements follows, morphing into rather more ordinary walking and crouching movements, accompanied by synchronised growls and shrieks. In the piece’s most notorious segment, Britney Spears’ “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” that Trojan Horse of post-feminist self-expression, blares as Eke placidly pees while standing upright, then rolls on the same patch of floor in gently erotic poses.

However, the piece is neither overtly angry nor in-yer-face combative. Eke maintains dispassionate focus: the ambient lighting never creates separation between audience and stage, and the work seems to ask us to observe and judge, rather than rise up in arms. Notice, for example, how much more monstrous than the mask is Eke’s naked body—even though it is both a culturally docile (depilated in all the right places) and aesthetically ‘successful’ (young, toned, thin) body. We are more accustomed to seeing rubber animal faces than epithet-less nudity. Notice how unpleasant it is to watch a woman growl: inarticulate sounds and purposeless body movements need not be particularly extreme to cross a boundary of what a healthy woman may do with herself. The residue of the spectre of hysteria still lurks in our minds. Observe how very easy it is for a female human to appear monstrous, as if it has only been partially digested by our civilisation. And when a man in a hazmat suit appears to clean the floor or hand Eke a towel, observe how his very presence upsets the all-female stage, how ineffably strange it is to see this man neither represent, uphold nor fight for any kind of patriarchy.

Echoes of other artists appear reduced to bare essence. Eke and another female performer fondle each other’s bodies with a pair of rubber hands on long poles: this is Pina Bausch, but gentle, a moment that relies on our body memory of uninvited hands sliding down our calves for its emotional impact. Or, Eke fills her body stocking with pink water balloons, posing in her new, distorted figure, half-undressing and ending up with the stocking knotted into a bundle on her back, hunched under a heavy load of blubbery things that look, for all intents and purposes, like a pile of teats, or breast implants. The image echoes a whole canon of female disfiguration in art (I thought of Nagi Noda’s Poodle Fitness) as well as that of the misadventures of plastic surgery and of certain kinds of pornography, but it simply asks us consider what a human might look like once it has more breasts than limbs.

And then, in a musical intermezzo to Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls),” hip hop empowerment, complete with an aggressive, ultra-sexualised choreography, is performed by an ensemble of variously-shaped girls, their nakedness made only starker by their running footwear and black bags on their heads. Drawing a link between the objectification and torture of people inside and outside of Abu Ghraib has already been made, with similar means, and perhaps more clarity, by Post in their Gifted and Talented, (2006), but Eke emphasises the vulnerability of these well-performing bodies, bodies that participate in their nominal liberation. Suddenly, Beyonce’s form of bravado displays exactly the weakness it is designed to hide. The painful powerlessness of this posturing is revealed by the sheer effort it requires, by the way it poorly fits a naked body, stripped of the armour of a hyper-sexualised costume.

As much as I tried, and despite everything I have read about it, I failed to see much of an all-encompassing exploration of human objectification in Monster Body. It seemed so clearly to draw a narrative arc of feminine non-liberation in present time, from the restrictive culturally condoned vulnerability of Britney to the restrictive culturally condoned strength of Beyonce. Its obvious interest in audience as a meaningful half of the performance also seemed to have fallen by the wayside, leaving a palpable void. However, as an essay on the physical restrictions of being a woman today, and a deeply thought-through one, it was very intellectually engaging. Shocking it wasn’t, but I suspect that was not its goal, either.

Dance Massive, Dancehouse: Monster Body, choreographer, performer Atlanta Eke, performers Amanda Betlehem, Tim Birnie, Tessa Broadby, Ashlea English, Sarah Ling; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 22-24;http://dancemassive.com.au

IN LIVE ART, CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE, DANCE, CINEMA AND DIGITAL ART THERE’S BEEN AN INCREASING FOCUS ON ENGAGING AUDIENCES WITH IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES THAT UNSETTLE NORMAL PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES.

In performance, approaches range from one-on-one encounters and sensory deprivation (eg total blackout or blindfolding in order to enhance hearing and touch), to various digital strategies, including the use of cinematic techniques and surround sound.

In Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals and, moreso, Antony Hamilton’s Black Project 2 there are times when you are not sure what you are seeing. No digital trickery is involved. In Physical Fractals it’s the rapid movement of two bodies in radically diminishing light such that limbs become barely visible brush strokes in the dark (oddly, not unlike the tracery caught by digital cameras). In Black Project 2, a pulsing organism turns out to be a cluster of human bodies that mutates such that its components, six dancers, rarely figure as individual humans. Matthew Day’s Intermission also plays with our perceptual attentiveness as we empathically attune to the fast “wave vibrations” that so very slowly propel him (see interview).

In Tim Darbyshire’s thoroughly immersive and aptly titled More or Less Concrete the visual and aural senses are confounded, often at the same time. Visually, this is accomplished by Darbyshire’s intensely slow-moving sculptural choreography and initially very low levels of light (further muted by a forestage scrim). Three bodies are interlocked in such a way that it’s hard to discern where each begins and ends. Eventually, as our eyes keep adjusting, one body slowly breaks off. With a crash the structure collapses—a rare moment of shock in More or Less Concrete. That first body rolls forward, reshaping, and is then followed by the others. Their slow time has by now become ours as we slip into a contemplative state.

At the same time, each of us in the audience wearing the provided headphones has been overhearing a distant, muted conversation without grasping its content, as if the real world is slipping away from us. There are noises too, rustlings, breathing, eventually revealed to be coming from the miked performers. We hear what could be soft rain and wind. It becomes more intense, almost stormy, oceanic even, somehow resonant with the enveloping blue light. (I learn later from Darbyshire that nearly all this sound comes direct from the stage, treated digitally by sound designer Jem Savage in a show which also credits a dramaturg/sound theorist, Thembi Soddell.)

The three bodies emit gasps, extreme exhalations and coughs while hands slap and brush the floor, creating an odd musicality. Darbyshire’s three dancers (he’s one of them) continue to appear alien, their full human form denied us as, backs to us, they turn upside down, legs and feet away from us, unseen. Bottoms up, they appear octopus-like—bulbous shapes with arms spread out flat to the floor like tentacles, hands thumping and swishing. When the trio suddenly swing their legs over their torsos to hit the floor with their feet, their heads remain pulled back, out of sight, creating a new breed: headless humans.

In the ensuing action, the performers move inexorably, if as slowly as ever, towards us. More palpably human and in now intensely blue light they raise a low wall, crawl over it, scuffing across a sparkling blue terrain and generating something like wind moving across a grassy plain. In a line they swivel back and forward, as if ascertaining which direction to take before committing to keep moving forward. We glimpse their faces.

Finally they stand before us, heads moving as if gauging their whereabouts; but their eyes are closed, suggesting beings who have either not evolved sight or who, living in darkness, have lost it. One turns away and moves slowly back into the dark. The other two lean back to back, knees bent low, a new creature, following the first into invisibility.

As Darbyshire himself suggests in his program note, More or Less Concrete is rich in connotations. Like Gideon Obarzanek’s Glow or his Mortal Engine, or Antony Hamilton’s Black Project 2, there’s an evocation of non-human, organic life without making it literal: in the end it’s about the ways human bodies move and connect formally and quite abstractly expressed through dance. Darbyshire writes in his program note, “The bodies are abstracted as they transform between human, animal, monster, machine and ‘other.’ The choreography oscillates and suspends between recognisable ‘concrete’ realities and ambiguous or surrealistic states.”

Darbyshire describes More or Less Concrete as “an analytical performance work, centred on introverted and contained bodies that observe and listen.” These words could equally apply to the audience as much as to the personae in More or Less Concrete. It’s a thought that occupies Darbyshire, as revealed in his realtime tv interview.

In contrast to the fervid energy expended in the movement and sound in most works in Dance Massive 2013, More or Less Concrete’s tautly focused scenario extends and suspends our sense of time with dextrously slow movement, contortion and balance, finely tuned lighting and subtle performer-driven soundscapes. Not at all dancerly in a conventional sense, but demandingly drawing on the capacities of trained dancers, More or Less Concrete is an exemplar of lo-tech sensory immersion with which Tim Darbyshire challenges us to reassess our sensory grasp of the world.

Dance Massive: Arts House & Tim Darbyshire: More or Less Concrete, choreographer Tim Darbyshire, performers: Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Josh Mu, sound Design Jem Savage, lighting Ben (Bosco) Shaw, Bluebottle, dramaturge, sound theorist Thembi Soddell, costumes Rebecca Agnew; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 20-24; http://dancemassive.com.au

See the realtime tv interview with Tim Darbyshire and Carl Nilsson-Polias’ review.

KOREA IS HOME TO RICH TRADITIONS OF RITUAL, SPIRITUAL LIFE AND FINELY DEVELOPED DANCE FORMS. PERFORMED THROUGHOUT KOREA FOR GENERATIONS, TO CELEBRATE THE HARVEST, TO KEEP THE SEA AT BAY, RITUALS BIND THE COMMUNITY THROUGH MOVEMENT AND DANCE.

Dancers have performed in royal courts, on rice fields and in city restaurants. Dance is valued and celebrated throughout Korean culture, its greatest exponents participating in the UN cultural heritage register. Shamanism is also part of the Korean spiritual everyday.

So, it’s no great surprise to see a traditional dance performance in Korea opened by a female shaman. (Jin Ok-sub’s Festive Land company opened Cheoyong-gut with a female shaman’s blessing for the Seoul International Dance Festival, Hoam Art Hall, Seoul, Korea, the 11th Seoul International Dance Festival, October 2008.) Korean audience members appear to adapt well to the shift from spiritual spaces to the domain of performance. They run onto the stage, tucking money into the performers’ clothes and props for good luck, laughing and smiling. Shamanism has a context in Korean society, even in its biggest city, Seoul, where shamanistic spaces are made within Buddhist temples in the centre of its business district.

Soo Yuen You is privy to this legacy. Her mother is a traditional Korean dancer and she maintains close relations with a shaman in Korea, who oversaw the spiritual elements of [Gu:t], Soo’s work-in-progress. Her collaborator, Australian Indigenous dancer Albert David, understands this spiritual legacy. Allied to two different Aboriginal communities, David has access to a spiritual domain which underlies the community’s cultural everyday.

How then to bring these two spiritual traditions together in the context of adapting Korean spiritual culture to the stage? [Gu:t] is already well developed in terms of its staging. The showing we were witness to had lighting, stage and costume design and musical composition. It also established certain elements from the two traditions of its key performers, Soo Yeun You and Albert David. Korean characters, selected by Soo’s Korean shaman and spiritual advisor, were painted on wall hangings suspended from the ceiling. David used ochre, performing a finely nuanced set of Aboriginal dance movements, perhaps totemic. Soo also performed elements of traditional Korean dance.

In narrative terms, these two spiritual cultures were drawn together through ritual notions of death, spirit and mourning, arising from David’s experience of helping his grandmother die. The beginning of [Gu:t] was incredibly potent, not merely evocative, but somehow drew together elements to create an atmosphere onstage. Perhaps the notion of death, which we all share, enabled this beginning to summon something powerful.

Since this is and felt like a work-in-progress, I will respond to what I saw onstage in relation to the challenge of turning [Gu:t] into a finished piece. It seems to me that Soo and David each have a strong spiritual and movement legacy which exists in the context of each tradition. As choreographer, Soo has to make decisions about the transformation and adaptation of these traditions to the stage and for audiences who probably have little experience of the underlying traditions. It is not that it isn’t possible to make the move. A number of Korean artists have made wonderful pieces both for Korean and international audiences. Each has made decisions about how to shift their work onto the stage, and what to do with traditional elements within a contemporary or modernist frame.

Soo is in a unique position, having moved to Australia, and also collaborating with an Indigenous dancer and cultural exponent. [Gu:t] explored a number of different ways of staging this relationship within a distinctively Korean spiritual setting. David danced his own heritage, including the ritual of covering his own body with ochre. Soo performed elements of traditional dance. The two dancers also came together in duet form, with David partnering Soo in a ballet style of lift and lowering through a variety of postures. Narrative elements of illness and healing were enacted. Finally, Soo used David’s ochre to trace a number of characters in a circle onstage. Some of the actions, props and spatial structures had symbolic significance.

The showing raised a number of questions from a choreographic perspective: how to bring these elements together? What to keep and what to leave behind? Then there is the question of shamanism and the stage, which is both choreographic and something more than that, and finally, the relationship between spiritual practices, an evolving and collaborative project. Dalisa Pigram (Gudirr Gudirr) resolved the question of cultural differences within her own body. [Gu:t] will need to find its own resolution. The question of value also arises, whether the aim of [Gu:t] is to give audiences a spiritual experience, to produce a work of artistic value, to foreground one culture over another or to make a work whose value arises from its hybridity.

Dance Massive, Malthouse: [Gu:t], concept, performance Soo Yeun You, Albert David, choreography Soo Yeun You, design Priya Namana, lighting Alexandre Malta, composition Gus Macmillan, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, March 21-22; http://dancemassive.com.au

JO LLOYD’S FUTURE PERFECT CONJURES A DYSTOPIAN VISION OF A LESS THAN PERFECT FUTURE OR, IF NOT THE FUTURE, FOR TRANSCENDENCE IN THE PRESENT, WHICH SEEMS PARTLY REALISABLE VIA ECSTATIC DANCING AND RITUAL GESTURE BUT APPEARS, AT THE VERY END, TO BE UNSUSTAINABLE.

Curiously, as RealTime Associate Editor Gail Priest suggested to me, musically and costume-wise Lloyd looks back to a popular culture past in order to find the means to achieve transcendence now. Priest pointed to a similar impulse in Balletlab’s And All Things Return to Nature (which will be reviewed in RealTime 114; it was not part of the Dance Massive program).

The perfection offered by transcendence which is sought in Lloyd’s work is indeterminate, but it has religious connotations. The five dancers function with intense communality, as an organism of worship, arms reaching up uniformly, bodies forming tightly entwined clusters and lines with precise, darting head movements or hands raised in apparent supplication, or palms to palms, face to face signalling total togetherness. Precise, rapid movement, recurrent gestures and eyes filled with awe convey a frightening obsessiveness apt in an era of ever-burgeoning fundamentalisms. Occasionally the group flies apart, individuals spinning or gesticulating furiously, only to seamlessly reform with a common pulse.

The glitter and cut of the costuming, against a gleaming foil sheet the width of the stage, evokes 80s glam rock; the music, with its swelling themes and accessible tonality, makes a perfect partner. You might think that the juxtaposition of these ingredients and a pumping dance of adoration would yield laughter, but the effect is not ironic, although some of the ecstatic limb quivering and mechanistic head turns are faintly comic.

It’s the ending of Future Perfect that casts a pall over the hope that a shared spirituality can embody perfection, and there’s nothing at all funny about it. A recurrent motif has one of the group’s members falling to the floor, presumably in a state of ecstatic collapse. In a final sequence, each member moves towards the audience, topples, is quickly rescued, taken upstage and resurrected while another individual moves forward. This cycle is repeated but more darkly as the treatment of those who have fallen becomes less caring with individuals dragged away and wrestled to the floor. In the third cycle, care returns.

This last scene is highly ambiguous. A failure of ritual? The participants no longer look to the heavens, but out at the audience. Ecstasy, if that’s what it is, is short-lived and part of a struggle, devoid of the danced cohesion that opened Future Perfect. The prelude to this finale is a series of recorded utterances, prefiguring the ambiguity to come, including, “I just gave into it,” “I just wanted to go home. I wasn’t myself,” “I couldn’t feel my body,” “I was watching the community from the outside,” “It was all so perfect.”

Structurally, Future Perfect has strengths and weaknesses. The trajectory from tautly cohesive worship to crumbling ritual is strong, revealing a succession of states of being and means of expressing unity and transcendence. There’s even an odd folk like dance passage to an engaging musical chiming (distorting badly), not dissimilar in mood to a protracted left foot-right foot bouncing routine in Brooke Stamp’s equally ritualistic And All Things Return to Nature. There’s also a passage, prior to the final movement, in which this group of perhaps proselytising worshippers consumes more and more of the space around it, individual members preoccupied with their own moves.

Less structurally and thematically certain is the insertion of a video animation (Rhian Hinkley) duplicated on screens either side of the foil wall. It shows faces of some of the dancers in states of digital dissolution, sliced into stacked landscape-like layers or spinning slowly outwards in cosmic whorls. While interesting in itself, the video, presumably representing a sense of oneness with the universe, the ensuing blackout and the feeling of starting up again significantly disrupts the organic flow of Future Perfect.

If not an entirely satisfactory work, with its odd retro-futuristic framing and uncertain structure, Future Perfect did suggest, if quite apolitically, issues around the interplay of movement, spirit and community in an era in which atheism and religion do battle, fundamentalisms are oppressive (but liberating for many) and transcendence is sought through religion, drugs or a feeling of being at one with the universe often associated with dance.

Doubtless Lloyd was not thinking so broadly, or deeply, about such matters, but Future Perfect suggested much in its own idiosyncratic way. As Stephanie Lake and Antony Hamilton have made clear in their realtime tv interviews, their aesthetic intentions were quite formal, abstract even, and they have been surprised at the sheer volume of literal interpretation applied to their works. Roland Barthes once wrote words to the effect that “denotation is the last of the connotations.” There’s a human impulse to constantly make sense, attaching the all too many signifiers that buzz about our brains to anything that does not immediately suggest meaning, and sooner or later we arrive at what ‘it’s about.’

In the work of Russell Dumas however you feel you’re simply seeing movement—although there are the often fascinating connotations of provenance: ballet, a broad spectrum of modern dance, contact improvisation and generations of Dumas-influenced dancers. There are even moments in Dance for the time being, as Virginia Baxter points out in her review, where a surprise movement is unusually suggestive.

Works by younger choreographers—Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals and Tim Darbyshire’s More or Less Concrete—refuse literal meaning because of their sheer strangeness, although the latter’s creation of some kind of strange organism (made up of three merging and de-merging performers) suggests incidental kinship with Gideon Obarzanek’s Glow and Mortal Engine and Antony Hamilton’s Black Project 2, as well as the clustering bodies in Lloyd’s Future Perfect.

Larissa McGowan’s Skeleton and Anouk Van Dijk’s 247 Days for Chunky Move, are clearly about something—young minds and bodies. But as Van Dijk says in her realtime tv interview, what seized her was the sudden oscillations in the psyches of people in their 20s between euphoria and despair, a suddenness she captures in her distinctive choreography and the structure of 247 Days (see Philipa Rothfield’s review). This lends the work an almost ritualistic fervour that resonates with the push for release and transcendence in the other works mentioned here and the slippage between individual states and compulsive togetherness, cosmically choral even in 247 Days.

However, when most dancing in Dance Massive which is bolstered by huge experimental musical compositions and wrap-around sounds that increasingly occupy the affective space of dance, only Tim Darbyshire deploys intense slowness of movement and subtle sonics that actually come from the dancers. Perhaps this is just another means to achieve a sense of immersion for the audience in an era preoccupied with achieving transcendence, secular or religious.

Dance Massive: Arts House & Jo Lloyd: Future Perfect, choreographer, director Jo Lloyd, performers Luke George, Madeleine Krenek, Shian Law, Jo Lloyd, Lily Paskas, lighting, set designer Jennifer Hector, music Duane Morrison, costumes Doyle Barrow, projection designer Rhian Hinkley, Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 20-24; http://dancemassive.com.au

THE TITLE MORE OR LESS CONCRETE MIGHT AS WELL BE A CONCISE PERSONALITY TEST OF THE HALF-GLASS VARIETY. ARE YOU A MORE CONCRETE PERSON? OR A LESS CONCRETE PERSON? OR ARE YOU MORE OR LESS A CONCRETE PERSON?

Do you look for concrete meaning, narrative and figuration in Tim Darbyshire’s creation? Or do you look instead between the figuration to the abstractions, reveries and enigmas? You might find yourself pondering such questions as you take off your headphones at the end of More or Less Concrete.

Yes, you get headphones. For a production presented with a fairly standard end-on seating bank and a letterbox proscenium arch it seems an odd choice. The sound design itself rarely makes specific use of the medium in terms of aural quality, apart from at the very beginning, when a brilliant rendering of a muffled conversation between a man and a woman seems real enough for one to question the soundproofing of the North Melbourne Town Hall. Apart from that, the sound itself is not so quiet, nor so delicate that one needs headphones to discern it.

What the headphones largely achieve is to personalise and internalise the audio. On the one hand, there is the physical reality that no one else is hearing what’s on your headphones. On the other hand, there is the paranoia that someone else’s headphones are getting better sound. Looking at rows of audience members in front of you, it becomes impossible not to feel distanced from them by this technological interference and perhaps the ubiquity of headphones in public spaces has rendered them a visual liability as much as an aural utility. This personalising aspect is compounded by the way our brains process information from headphones. We can perceive depth, location and movement using only our ears. When we move our heads, the sound signals alter slightly and this gives us even clearer metrics on where the sound is coming from. Headphones, by not changing the sound signals when we move our heads, cancel our depth perception. Our brain decides that the sound cannot be external and collapses the sound image into our head.

For a work like More or Less Concrete, this internalisation of the audio is a potential boon. So much of what Darbyshire seems to be striving for here is a liminal space between humour and melancholy, between the concrete and the abstract. The internalising aspects of the headphones can engender the pensive questioning of ambiguity required, they beg for subjective wandering. Yet, Darbyshire and his collaborators have not fully capitalised on their decision. The sound design largely remains within the literal diegetic sphere of amplified sounds from the stage relayed in real time. These sounds themselves are often literal in their choreographic derivation: the dancers move their arms as though being inflated and make sounds of inflation, the dancers move like animals and growl appropriately, a dancer bites an apple and we hear the crunch of an apple. Musique concrète is cited as an inspiration but there is only very occasionally the kind of collage, musicality and poetry that Pierre Schaeffer and his acolytes brought to that form. When the sound and the movement do contrast, both are made more profound, more expansive and mysterious. We are given room to imagine, to set our minds adrift in this non-literal space and the piece lifts accordingly. In other words, I wanted less concrete and more concrète.

Visually, More or Less Concrete can be seen as an evolutionary bildungsroman in blue. It begins with a distant body, an indiscernible blue clay that writhes slowly until it ejects one human form, then another and another. Their bodies are heavy, weighed down by the primordial soup, leaving only their backsides to float upwards. They find breath, they find limbs, they find extension. Bit by bit, they approach us, mounting one obstacle after another though they can barely stand. As they emerge finally beyond the proscenium, the house lights rise to meet them but their eyes are closed like moles, like newborns. It is all too much for them. Not 45 minutes ago they were still sparks in Prometheus’ eye. Now, they retreat slowly into the gloom far away.

But through our headphones we still hear their echo in our heads. Sound travels slower than light.

Dance Massive: Arts House & Tim Darbyshire: More or Less Concrete, choreographer Tim Darbyshire, performers: Sophia Cowen, Tim Darbyshire, Josh Mu, sound Design Jem Savage, lighting Ben (Bosco) Shaw, Bluebottle, dramaturge, sound theorist Thembi Soddell, costumes Rebecca Agnew, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 20-24; http://dancemassive.com.au/

“YOU ALWAYS IMAGINE HOW IT’S GOING TO BE.” SO SAYS A VOICE RECORDING OVER A CINEMA-LIKE SCORE IN THE CLOSING MINUTES OF JO LLOYD’S FUTURE PERFECT.

Imagining the future tends to lead writers and choreographers to similar conclusions, each with their particular aesthetic and philosophy. This includes uniformly attired humans signalling submission to an overarching ideal or identity. Here it is expressed with glittery Torvill and Dean-cum-gothic punk outfits.

Uniformity is an exterior marker of a oneness of mind: a community so in tune it is on the verge of becoming a single organism. Even when the dancers move separately they are like the parts of a clock, working together to achieve an obscure function.

Future Perfect comes with a loud music warning—Dance Massive 2013 has been punctuated by decibel-heavy beats and has seen sound volume take on a near physical presence. After the sonic punch of Physical Fractals where I cocooned my growing belly with my arms, I googled “do loud noises affect unborn babies?” Thankfully, it seems not. This performance was on the moderate level of aural challenge—occasionally an unpleasant frequency, the pitch a notch above inner ear comfort. This seemed to fit the general picture of discomfort one might experience at a warehouse rave, which was my first impression of the set. The metallic backdrop hinted at the interior of a machine, ripples of light covering the stage as the five dancers raised their arms and faces upward in a kind of religious ecstasy (rather than an amphetamine-induced one). The performers merge to create a kind of Shiva as Nataraja—the multi-armed Lord of Dance. The repeated worshipping arm movements reminded me of old Hindi films where entertainment has a starting point in religious ritual.

Entertainment is high on the agenda; the lighting and set design by Jennifer Hector brings drama in the form of a sci-fi cinema experience to the audience. Screens at either side of the stage reveal 3D animations of the dancers’ faces distorted into pixel galaxies, Rhian Hinkley’s imagery suggesting a kind of breaking down of the individual by technology. While maybe a pertinent point in the concept of future’s ‘uniformity’ or undividedness, it jarred a little with the images of ecstatic unity on stage. Overall though, the production is glamorous and exuberant, crackling with an electric charge, if occasionally suggesting an errant question.

In Lloyd’s Future, humans succumb to a higher, irresistible force; they map out galactic paths in a fever, they support each other and fit around each other without competition. These high-energy moments wind down to stillness and a disassembling and regrouping. The dancers embody both strength and grace like future perfect bodies and, despite their apparent uniformity, each brings something of the individual to the piece, like characters from a cult movie. I was particularly struck by the fire and efficacy of movement of mustachioed Luke George; he raised the bar on opening night.

Ecstasy means to “stand outside the ordinary self.” Future Perfect is both an otherwordly and out of body, out of self, experience where the dancers finally and repeatedly collapse in on themselves, giving in to the magnetic force of the mass.

Stephanie Lake in conversation with Keith Gallasch about her work Dual, co-presented with Arts House, for Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive, Arts House: choreographer, costume designer Stephanie Lake, performers Alisdair Macindoe, Sara Black, composer, lighting designer Robin Fox, producer Freya Waterson, Insite Arts; Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

Dalisa Pigram in conversation with Keith Gallasch about Gudirr Gudirr presented by Arts House & Marrugeku for Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive, Arts House: Gudirr Gudirr, concept, performer and co-choreographer Dalisa Pigram, director and co-choreographer Koen Augustijnen, set design and video artist, Vernon Ah Kee, video production Sam James, composer & sound designer Sam Serruys, singer and songwriter Stephen Pigram, lighting design Matthew Marshall, concept and cultural advisor Patrick Dodson, dramaturg & creative producer Rachael Swain, executive producer John Baylis. Produced by Stalker Theatre and co-commissioned by the City of Melbourne through Arts House, Theatre Im Pfalzbau, Ludwigshafen (Germany) and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg; Marrugeku, Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

Choreographer Lee Serle in conversation with Keith Gallasch about P.O.V presented at Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, as part of Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive, Arts House: P.O.V. director, choreographer Lee Serle, performers, collaborators James Andrews, Kristy Ayre, Lily Paskas, Lee Serle, lighting Ben Cisterne, composition, sound design Luke Smiles, set design Lee Serle, costumes Lee Serle, Shio Otani in collaboration with the performers; production management Megafun, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 12-16; dancemassive.com.au/

Chunky Move choreographer and director Anouk van Dijk discusses the creation of 247 Days, presented by Malthouse as part for Dance Massive 2013.

Dance Massive, Malthouse: Chunky Move, 247 Days, concept, choreography Anouk van Dijk, performers Leif Helland, Lauren Langlois, Alya Manzart, James Pham, Niharika Senapati, Tara Soh, composition, sound designer Marcel Wierck, set design Michael Hankin, lighting Niklas Pajanti, costumes Shio Otani; The Malthouse Theatre, March 15–23; dancemassive.com.au

ATTENDING A NEW PERFORMANCE BY RUSSELL DUMAS IS ALWAYS AN OCCASION. THE AMBIENCE IN THE FOYER ON OPENING NIGHT IS CONVIVIAL, THE AUDIENCE SPRINKLED WITH LOYAL FORMER AFFILIATES OF DANCE EXCHANGE, ACKNOWLEDGING DUMAS’ ENDURING INFLUENCE ON THE FIELD.

Enhancing our sense of place, we are led along a laneway to the back entrance of Dancehouse, up a set of rustic wooden stairs from which we glimpse in passing the ruins of what looks like a disused brickworks next door. We pass through the doors of the theatre observing a line of dancers against the wall. Seated, we regard the pristine space—shiny wooden floor, four windows letting in the 7pm light—where two of the dancers have already begun their performance without us.

In familiar Dance Exchange style, to the rhythms of breathing, the black clad performers on the floor lean, spin and pivot. At first they appear to be testing their weight against the solidity of walls and floor and then each other. As each sequence ends the dancers simply depart the space to be replaced by others from the waiting line. We recognise the characteristic gestures of affinity, seamless conjoining, sensuous balances, lifts that look easy at first but soon reveal their effort.

Much of the dancing we’ve seen at Dance Massive has been of the heavy duty variety—falling, shaking, spinning, sharply articulated, moving fast and furious; not to mention facing down the elements—extreme sound, light and spatial deprivation, smoke. The performers of Dance Exchange meanwhile “explore the relationship between doing and being” in a relatively safe environment. “The human being is already performative,” says Dumas. “It goes without saying more precisely because it came before saying” (Dance Massive brochure).

Not that all this “being” is undemanding (as we know). There are moments, which, within the context might even be deemed spectacular—small eruptions, remarkable and unexpected turns, a springing on all fours across the floor. In a couple of extended duets that form centrepieces for the work, Jonathan Sinatra appears at first to be the more forceful of the duo until you detect the equivalent power needed from Linda Sastradirpradja and Nicole Jenvey to propel and maintain their own bodies in the lifts. Surprising body parts are called upon to elevate, push or pull another. One is held stiffly horizontal and rolled up and onto the other. Clasped hands connect with a raised arm to create suspension. In vertical configurations or lying side by side, these bodies display their strength in relative stillness.

There are often two or three sites of action—a trio there, a duet here—initially splitting our attention then revealing their rhythmic turns or limbs raised in unison. Unlike the duets, which are more formal and demanding, there are youthful bursts of movement—slaps, running, followed by a languid line-up. Overall, a sense of reverie prevails, of people in thrall, fluidly shifting from one position to the next and then falling into synch. There are moments of pause when you venture a scenario or even glimpse something potentially balletic in those pointed toes, that extended, graceful arm, the faintly familiar configurations of the pas de deux. There are even flashes of drama—he grabs her ankles, pulls himself into a foetal curl and then unfolds, lifts her up with a foot under one buttock; Jenvey clasps Sinatra tightly around his torso, lets him go and he collapses. Importantly, nothing is held long enough to allow connotation to cloud the view. More often meaning slips and we’re absorbed in an easy sense of overlap. Something ends, something else begins, to be continued another time.

As the sun sets, we detect subtle patterns of introduced light on the walls. Never directly on the dancers, the shapes build to overlapping rectangles like a series of modernist paintings gradually expanding along the wall. Shadows and silhouettes dance before us. Leaving, we’re invited to walk through the charged space of the performance that now lets in the night. Outside, a pale yellow half-moon is on the rise.

Dance Massive & Dancehouse: Dance Exchange; dance for the time being –Southern Exposure, director Russell Dumas, performer/creative producer Linda Sastradipradja, performers Jonathan Sinatra, Nicole Jenvey, Rachel Doust, David Huggins, Sarah Cartwright, Eric Fon, Molly McMenamin, Dancehouse, March 19-21

Choreographer Antony Hamilton in conversation with Keith Gallasch about Black Projects 1 & 2, Dance Massive 2013

Dance Massive: Arts House and Antony Hamilton Projects, Black Projects 1 & 2, choreography, concept Antony Hamilton, Black Project 1: performers Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, video projection , Olaf Meyers, music Robert Henke, Mika Vainio and Vainio and Fennesz, design Antony Hamilton; Black Project 2: performers James Batchelor, Jake Kuzma, Talitha Maslin, Jessie Oshodi, Marnie Palomares, Jess Wong, costume design Paula Levis, sound designer Alisdair Macindoe, video design Kit Webster, set construction, production Management Matthew Scott, Megafun, producer Freya Waterson, Insite Arts; Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

Byron Perry, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc

FOUR YEARS AGO, AT DANCE MASSIVE 2009, THE MEAT MARKET IN NORTH MELBOURNE PLAYED HOST TO THE PREMIERE OF LUCY GUERIN’S UNTRAINED. HER LATEST WORK, CONVERSATION PIECE, CAN BE READ AS AN EVOLUTION AND EXTRAPOLATION ON THIS EARLIER WORK.

Untrained placed two professional dancers beside two complete dance novices in an investigation of performativity, purity and, of course, training. Conversation Piece places three professional dancers beside three professional actors in an investigation of performativity, language and modes of communication.

Untrained was restricted to a clinical essence of form, a physical call-and-response, where the authorial voice of Guerin was evident only in the structure (a list of provocations) rather than in the content, which wholly derived from the performers. Conversation Piece operates with a somewhat looser form, where the performers now respond to one another’s provocations, and is leavened with choreographed intermissions that act to reassert Guerin’s voice in proceedings. Guerin also gradually inflects the piece with a unifying tone and a quasi-narrative based around the performers as characters rather than the performers as themselves.

The set for Untrained was simply a grey square marked out by a white line. The set for Conversation Piece is a minimalist suggestion of an anonymous waiting space—a bus terminal, a Centrelink office—with its three sets of four orange chairs echoing those in Shaun Parker’s This Show is About People (2008).

Untrained was an experiment in physical performance unmediated by technology. Conversation Piece is an experiment mediated by iPhones, which do not act as phones, but rather as audio and video recording devices, playback devices and, crucially, as signifiers of the age.

Megan Holloway, Kath Tonkin, Stephanie Lake, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc

What is the value of juxtaposition? When one places a trained body beside an untrained body, does it simply reveal that one can pirouette, the other not? When one places an actor beside a dancer, does it simply reveal that one can speak, the other move? When one places one show beside another, does it similarly reveal only the literal points of difference?

In Untrained, the juxtaposition revealed as much about the audience as it did about the men on stage; what did we find engaging, funny, charming, impressive? It deftly walked the line between a celebration of naivety and experience, without falling into mawkishness or snobbery.

In Conversation Piece, the juxtaposition is more complex and more ambitious. Yes, we are at times invited to witness the gladiatorial struggle between body and voice, as though it were a battle of virtuosity where our laughter or applause determine the victor. But we are also asked to consider how both these forms—how communication itself—is affected by the iPhones’ mediations.

The work begins with an eight-minute improvised conversation between the three dancers, which is recorded on iPhones. The three actors enter, plug into an iPhone each and listen back to the conversation. Each actor then relays one of the dancers’ words, but stripped of modulation, gestures or appropriate tone. When all laughs are presented as cackles, all words presented with the same intonation and there is no gestural language available, it becoms a spoken text message. Some commentators have begun diagnosing texting-addicted teenagers and 20-somethings as ‘flatliners’—their lack of engagement with the spoken word turning them into the walking dead of verbal communication. In Conversation Piece, the actors bring them alive.

In other respects, Conversation Piece rehashes some very familiar 20th century tropes. The presentation of people linked together on a superficial level of purpose but without any expressive connections—that is to say, people waiting together at a bus terminal—is at least as old as Jean-Paul Sartre and his conceptions of seriality and alterity. So, if philosophers and artists have warned of increasing human disconnectedness since the inception of radio, what more can be said? Perhaps nothing completely new, but Guerin steadily pushes the tone of Conversation Piece into unexpectedly sinister landscapes.

At first, we might see a young woman talking irrepressibly in a one-way stream—channelling all three parts of the original recorded conversation. Then, the social one-sidedness might morph into the attempt a young man makes to converse with another man capable only of non-sequiturs. After this, that young man might start to manipulate the other man’s body in an increasingly cruel and unusual manner. Perhaps a woman debases and humiliates another woman in front of everyone. Perhaps a man, uncomfortable in conversation, unsure of himself with others, enacts a slow motion murderous fantasy in a bus terminal. The most important aspect is that all these things happen as monologues.

Conversation Piece is not about the conversation at the beginning of the show. It is about the lack of conversation anywhere else.

See also the review of the first season (with largely different cast) of Conversation Piece at Belvoir in Sydney: www.realtimearts.net/

Dance Massive, Arts House: Lucy Guerin Inc & Belvoir, Conversation Piece, choreographer, director Lucy Guerin, performers Megan Holloway, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Byron Perry, Kath Tonkin, Matthew Whittet, set, costume design Robert Cousins, lighting design Damien Cooper, sound designer, composer Robin Fox; Arts House, Meat Market, March 19-24; http://dancemassive.com.au/

Tara Soh, James Pham, Lauren Langlois, Leif Helland, Niharika Senapati, Alya Manzart, 247 Days, Chunky Move

247 DAYS IS DARK: DARK THOUGHTS, DARK SPACE, A DARK VISION ALL ROUND. OSTENSIBLY ARISING OUT OF ANOUK VAN DIJK’S MOVE FROM EUROPE TO AUSTRALIA, 247 DAYS IS VERY MUCH CONCERNED WITH THE INNER WORLD OF ITS PERFORMERS, WHETHER REAL OR NOT. THE QUESTION OF THE REAL IS LESS IMPORTANT IN ANY CASE, FOR THIS IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFABULATION.

The stage is dominated by a curved series of mirrors, a speculum of internal space. The work begins with an extended solo. A young woman (Lauren Langlois) contemplates her image intently, shifting weight, searching for reassurance which is structurally lacking, inasmuch as the mirror cannot compensate the anxieties which compel the search. Her own joints cannot offer support. She turns towards us, turns back, turns to us, turns back. This is an obsessive compulsion which finds relief neither in the image nor in the gaze of the other. The performer articulates her needs, her wants, her desires. Is she talking to us? I don’t think so.

This girl has no centre, she is hollow but for her anxieties. She runs then sets up a pattern of movements that the others join, each oriented towards their own image. The group is a set of splinters united in movement, divided by an atomistic mode of experience. There is nonetheless a certain pleasure in watching the group move together, gained through observing their collective mastery of space in time.

Their dancing is more sustained than their speech which is truncated: stuttered emotions garnered on the run and selected largely for their shadow side. These psychological bubbles are mirrored in momentary facial expressions, smiles more like the rictus of a corpse, a silent scream (reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope series). The muscles of the face swish over bone.

The spine is distended at the edges, the big toe a distorted coda to a leg turned inwards. Lines of movement traverse the body, not for beauty’s sake. Happily, phylogeny takes over and lizard crawls allow for a pure moment of cross-lateral slithering. That clear passage from one diagonal to its corresponding other becomes a linear clarity through space. I begin to recognise a kind of style. The body is the site of linear flows, which may begin with a pelvis flung inwards, a step turning into a twist, the torque of the torso, the body dipping for a leg lift, whatever it takes to keep this line of movement going. The head and spine undulate towards their maximum curvature. The head has a relative independence from the spine, suggesting a giddying loss of control, belied by the underlying skill needed to let go of vision’s anchorage. In fact, a great deal of the dancing has these two sides of the coin: letting go of control/amazing control in letting go.

The solos give way to duets and a trio. Much of the duet work consists of one partner holding and spinning the other like a centrifuge, the motion outwards counter-balanced by an inward spiral. Then the two lean towards each other, sharing weight, seeking touch through pouring weight into the body of the other. Sometimes one person will lead the movement of another through the head. The poetics of these partnerships has to do with relationships, variously expressed in terms of love, control, loss of control, agency and helplessness. One couple hug and fling in turns.

The curved mirror is broken up and deconstructed to produce a proliferation of reflections, liminal spaces to be occupied by the dancers. Bit by bit the work unravels to reveal individual reflections.

Attempting to reflect on the tenor of 247 Days, I find myself oscillating between thinking of it as a dystopian construction and seeing it as a social reflection of the real. Perhaps all dystopias have their root in the historical present, taking their line of flight through some imaginary proposition: the apocalypse, totalitarian hegemony, cultural cannibalism, man’s inhumanity to man.

247 Days explores an experiential slice of life, youthful, anxious, fearful, not especially happy. Faces are discontinuous with inner feelings, the mirror a crucible of angst. By contrast, the choreography works on a somewhat different register. The physical prowess of the performers rarely mirrors their expressions of insecurity and doubt. A certain seduction of performative skill—that is, the audience is drawn into the dancing—belies the internal sound of fury that finds expression through voice and facial gesture. Maybe this difference offers an out to the tendency for 247 Days to totalise the negative. Am I being too negative?

Chunky Move choreographer and director Anouk van Dijk discusses the creation of 247 Days, presented by Malthouse as part for Dance Massive 2013.

Chunky Move, 247 Days, concept, choreography Anouk van Dijk, performers Leif Helland, Lauren Langlois, Alya Manzart, James Pham, Niharika Senapati, Tara Soh, composition, sound designer Marcel Wierck, set design Michael Hankin, lighting Niklas Pajanti, costumes Shio Otani; The Malthouse Theatre, March 15–23; dancemassive.com.au

THE CHALLENGE TO DEVELOP A CONCEIT INTO A FULLY EMBODIED AND THEMATICALLY RICH IMAGE IS ALWAYS CONSIDERABLE. SANDRA PARKER RAMPS UP THE DISJUNCTION BETWEEN LIVE PERFORMANCE AND WHAT WE SEE ONSCREEN VIA CAMERA AND AMPLIFIES THE DIFFERENCE BY JUXTAPOSING MINIMALLY EXPRESSIVE MOVEMENT WITH MAXIMALLY EVOCATIVE MUSIC. HOW FAR CAN SHE TAKE THESE DISJUNCTIONS TO YIELD A MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCE?

The Recording is located on a film set (of which the audience, as in a TV show recording, are part) where three performers act out non-verbal expressions and actions in a series of takes, in between which they act at checking their scripts, mingling and rehearsing while technicians adjust lighting and camera positions. Initially, the un-contexualised actions, projected script fragments, Fiona Cameron’s sudden crawl across the floor and Trevor Patrick’s rejection of her subsequent intimate movement towards him are intriguing, building a sense of anticipation and some amusement at the vacuity of the spare gestures and ‘looks.’

The third performer, Phoebe Robinson, is positioned for a head and shoulders close-up, looking vaguely anxious, running her fingers repeatedly across her face or wiping her nose. As with all close-ups the audience can project emotions which are usually confirmed by context, but there’s little here save music. Robinson’s whole-body, off-screen self is a little more revealing, appearing gesturally assertive with someone we can’t see. The disjunction between images actual and virtual is sparely felt. While Robinson rehearses a set of moves the music develops a more potent sense of presence, its western idiom, bordering on movie music enriched with a kind of shakuhachi screech and pounding woodblocks—all very much at odds with what we are seeing.

During a set-up for a scene, Trevor Patrick delivers lines deadpan to Robinson in rehearsal. We can barely hear them, but a few leak through: “I thought it would be much more fun,” and some reference to danger. But we never see or hear these words filmed. A scene with Cameron in close-up, appearing concerned and frustrated, and gesturing emphatically before the camera, signals little at great length, feeling too close in production manner to the preceding Robinson episode, while the almost progressive rock score is worlds away from these small moves. The gap between affect and effect grows even more disjunctive when the sound score grabs snatches of Hollywood TV crime shows and soaps—“The DNA results are in. The kid’s all mine”—juxtaposing them with a massively swelling score a la Angelo Badalamenti for David Lynch, while the trio executes abstracted actions, comic even, for example Patrick flicking his head as if slapped.

In a third of the close-up series, instead of seeing the performer’s head on a large screen, we instead watch Patrick standing next to the small monitor on which he appears, but for which he has been pre-recorded, slipping a little in and out of synch with himself in a further erosion of the connection between real and virtual. However, this take does have some sense of progression as Patrick eventually moves a hand to his forehead and finally hangs his head as if defeated. Robinson and Cameron on the other hand appear to pretty much have repeated their moves. By now I’m not convinced that the three ‘portraits’ are at all telling, let alone significantly different between stage and screen versions. There is nothing idiosyncratic in the movement, nothing particularly subtle, very little that requires anything of dancers as skilled as this trio, save their restraint.

If this is a work about what is lost in the recapturing of movement, there’s not much in The Recording that hasn’t already been repeatedly captured, as the choreographer writes, by her use of “a movement vocabulary literally drawn from film and television, a strategy to present embodied movement we instinctually recognise and feel comfortable watching” (Parker, “Capturing the live moment, The Recording,” Dancehouse Diary, Issue 4, March-June, 2013).

A near final scene has Cameron and Patrick struggling with each other, Cameron falling to the floor and Patrick on top of her. There are multiple, tedious re-takes without variation while Robinson stands to one side. When the couple fall on the stage floor, she is left alone on the screen, as if we are to identify with her. Cameron then repeats the fall by herself, perhaps like ‘the body’ in a thriller. Finally our attention is focused on Robinson in a spare solo, hands wandering to face again, performing to a fractured song featuring the repeated word “amour” (somewhat in the manner of Brazilian New Yorker Arto Lindsay). Perhaps there’s some kind of narrative we might feel inclined to fill in between the abstracted moves and a loaded sound score (couple at odds, one person kills/wounds the other, third party feels abandoned) but that doesn’t seem to be the point, nor my inclination. Rather, in The Recording, specificity is eschewed as abstracted expressions, gestures and moves are played out in a thinly suggestive and largely affectless scenario which is ‘captured’ on screen.

There is a certain attractive delicacy of expression in The Recording and a tonal consistency that refuses the emotions suggested by the multilayered score. However, the calculated emptiness of the action and the floating signification of the music (albeit very engaging in itself) yields an unsatisfying, double sense of absence. Is there anything at all dialectical being played out between the work’s clichéd movement and its sonic material, and between the stage and screen images? The difference between body on stage and head on screen is not especially revealing. Nor do the restricted movements of the dancers signal a richer stage life than the camera evokes. The Recording cannot therefore mount a strong argument for the immediacy of movement/dance/acting over mediatised versions.

In her Dancehouse Diary essay Parker repeats the much-cited Peggy Phelan and Andre Lepecki theses from the mid-1990s about the impossibility of documentation and re-presentation being able to generate meaningful versions or experiences of original performances. These have assumed a precious, metaphysical absolutism accompanied by a mantra of ‘now, now, now.’ But what kind of ‘now’? The raw immediacy of live dance before an audience, as felt in, say, Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals or Stephanie Lake’s Dual, however much rehearsed and repeated? A ‘now’ that has moved well beyond film and television images when media technologies, popular culture and notions of the real and the now have radically mutated? A reified sense of the ‘now,’ is not helpful in this context. There’s no denying the power of live dance but paranoia about losing its immediacy to inimical media forces is the least of its worries. Sandra Parker’s The Recording left me guessing, and argumentative.

Co-incidentally, the reproduction issue is bound to be debated in Sydney when Kaldor Public Art Projects launches 13 Rooms in Sydney’s vast Wharf 2/3 (April 11-23). The show comprises recreations of performances and installations originally created and/or peformed by Marina Abramovic, John Baldessari, Joan Jonas, Damien Hirst, Tino Sehgal, artist duo Allora and Calzadilla, Simon Fujiwara, Xavier Le Roy, Laura Lima, Roman Ondák, Santiago Sierra and Xu Zhen. 140 local dancers and performers have been employed to realize the works. There’s one new work, by Brisbane performance duo Clark Beaumont.

The Recording, director, choreographer Sandra Parker, dancers Fiona Cameron, Trevor Patrick, Phoebe Robinson, lighting design Jenny Hector, projection designer Rhian Hinkley, composer, sound designer Steve Heather; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 13-16; http://dancemassive.com.au

MATTHEW DAY IS ALMOST CERTAINLY THE BEST OF A NEW GENERATION OF AUSTRALIAN CHOREOGRAPHERS. HE EXPLODED ONTO THE DANCE LANDSCAPE IN 2010, BRINGING AN ORIGINAL AND FULLY DEVELOPED POETICS SEEMINGLY OUT OF NOWHERE. HIS SERIES OF EXTREMELY SIMPLE, BUT CONCEPTUALLY RIGOROUS WORKS HAS CAPTIVATED THE AUDIENCE, AND AUSTRALIAN DANCE IS ALREADY IMMENSELY RICHER FOR IT.

Intermission is the final part of a trilogy that began with Thousands, in 2010, and continued with Cannibal, in 2011. In each part, Day explored the empathetic effect of absolutely basic movement: first stillness, then pulsating repetition. In Intermission, the focus is on undulating, rhythmic sway. The works are colour-coded: Thousands was gold, Cannibal pure white.

Intermission is black. We enter, one by one, a black box. A human figure is barely visible on a darkened stage: the lights are on us. The lights slowly dim, plunging us into a few minutes of pitch black. When the stage lights up, Day stands still, in casual black clothes: jeans, sneakers, gloves, and black masking tape where a line of skin might show between the cuffs.

As James Brown’s soundscape of a single droning, thundering sub-bass line sends pulsating tremors through our bodies, a sound more felt than heard, Day begins to almost imperceptibly rock left to right. His micro-shuffle grows, reaching shoulders, elbows, neck, arms, knees, until kinetic waves are flowing through Day’s entire body. This is not exactly choreography: rather, it is controlled movement. The only betrayal of the performer’s skill and training is in the constancy of rhythm and evenness of gesture: while strenuous, the movement never exhausts the body. The point of these pieces is not to explore endurance or produce exhaustion, but to maintain constancy.

Day’s works do not happen so much on stage as in one’s body as one watches. The real spectacle of these pieces is not in observing and admiring the dancing body, but in observing how being in the shared space with a moving body affects one’s own. The palpable rhythmic waves of kinetic energy emanating from the dancer, dense and tight and unrelenting, gradually build into very strong tension within one’s own body. A fellow spectator confided that during Thousands (an extremely still, slow piece) he felt an irresistible urge to stand up and do something, anything. Day has said elsewhere that he choreographs energetic exchange between performer and spectator: a choreographic situation that cannot exist without an audience. This is a more technical translation of what I try to describe to members of the general public, while queuing for the auditorium, as “it might upset your digestion.” “Should I not have gulped down my dinner?” asks one, half-jokingly. “That’s right,” I answer, very seriously.

Intermission, however, is comparatively light on one’s body. The pulsating, wave-like physicality that Day employs creates a light, but literal, hypnosis, a wandering focus, not dissimilar to boredom, but with a liberating lining of calmness. Our feeling of time and spatial proportion blurs into a drifting vagueness of perception. Suddenly, Day has shifted through the space, drawing ever-larger circles, one minute rocking a step at a time. I am light-headed, if not quite dizzy. At one point, I wonder if there is a way to test this effect, like in stage show hypnosis: how many of us would quack if asked? Would that make dramaturgical sense? Our bodies are tense, but there is a relief in the repetition: like jogging or disco dancing, this is a relaxing tension.

Meanwhile, Matthew Day’s rocking has morphed multiple times: from a sideways push/pull to a figure-eight arms loop, then back to a simple rocking with his head tilted back; shifts that feel both momentous and imperceptible. As usual, the eye perceives reference where there might be none: a preparation for strenuous activity; the rocking of anxiety or stress; repetitive industrial labour; mystical dancing; the liberating and oppressive capacities of a low-frequency repeat cycle. But Day channels no emotion, just blank focus, a mind merged with motion. When the work ends, it feels like any time at all might have passed.

To fully appreciate Matthew Day’s work, it is necessary to understand just how fundamentally it breaks not simply from modern dance, but from the full canon of modernist thought: the imperative of equating being with movement (not simply forward, but all kinetic acts of purposeful movement), a constant shedding of present for the future, the Cartesian individualism that posits the thinking subject as tragically severed from the world, and what Teresa Brennan (Exhausting Modernity, 2000) calls “the uniform denial of the transmission of affect.” In its small way, by slowing down time and expanding space, by creating an affective community, by rejecting spectacle for co-presence, Intermission is a demonstration of another way of being in the world, of empathetic being together.

Dance Massive, Dancehouse: Intermission, choreographer, performer Matthew Day, dramaturgy Martin del Amo, sound designer James Brown, lighting designer Travis Hodgson; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 17-19; http://dancemassive.com.au

FIVE DAYS IN AT DANCE MASSIVE WITH SEVEN WORKS UNDER THE BELT, THOUGHTS INEVITABLY TURN TO EMERGING THEMES.

Gudirr, Gudirr aside, social issues have made way for more conceptual investigations: Stephanie Lake’s experiment in emotional mathematics (Dual); Antony Hamilton’s study in negative space (Black Study 1 & 2); Lee Serle’s provocative play with the viewer’s point of reference (P.O.V); Natalie Abbott’s attempt to shift our perception of time (Physical Fractals) and Larissa McGowan’s skeletal choreography (Skeleton). To these we now add Ashley Dyer’s meditation on the motion of smoke in Life Support.

In each of these works the sensory apparatus of the audience is primary. In Dual a good memory for movement will enhance your pleasure; in Black Study 1 & 2, you will be aided by 20-20 vision; not surprisingly, the experience of P.O.V is linked to your feel for the best seat; Physical Fractals tests your capacity for endurance while randomly depriving you of sight and turning up the audio till it literally threatens to clout you.

At the same time, there’s a distinct demand for heavy lifting from the dancers at Dance Massive who are required to subject their bodies to all sorts of extremes. Small wonder that over at the National Dance Forum facilitators have been prodding the artists assembled to answer the question, “Why dance?”

Ashley Dyer’s Life Support is an intriguing work that while ostensibly focussing on an elemental phenomenon, like Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals, also offers insights into the capacities for endurance from both performer and audience.

At the outset we are asked to elect one among us to act on our behalf to end the performance we are about to witness. In our case, the choice is between a young man who saved someone from drowning and a woman who saw her suffering boyfriend through the flu. A quick show of hands for the boy wonder, an OHS warning, oxygen canisters all round and we confidently enter the performative arena.

What transpires was apparently inspired in part for Ashley Dyer by the sight of a nurse taking a break for a cigarette outside a hospital. Standing in for the nurse, performer Tony Osborne seated in the centre of the room rolls and lights up a cigarette. Those of us who remember the days when this apparently innocent ritual combined mindfulness with impaired respiration are momentarily nostalgic. These days we worry at the mere sight of any actor required to smoke. The vapour from the cigarette is transformed into elegant rings generated not by the smoker but by a technician circling him in the dark. Though the apparatus is awkward, the effect is mesmerising. The performer moves through a sequence of poses, but is now much less interesting to us than everything that is happening around him. Smoke circles drift above his head or around his body and wobble towards us. Large and small they dance for a moment and then crash into Osborne’s head or dissolve in air. The circles are joined by bubbles filled with smoke that give us more joy as they bounce and break, emptying their curly contents.

All this playful pleasure takes a dark turn as an assistant places a box around the performer and slowly wraps it in plastic. As this is happening, we note the play of smoke across the floor is now a flood and that the stuff is also seeping over the top of the doors to the space. The box is now bright white with smoke.

Some in the audience are beginning to feel uneasy. One shouts to the performer “Are you okay?” to which there is, of course, no answer. That would be breaking the code. Like watching an escape artist in a circus, most acknowledge there’s smoke and mirrors involved. Some urge our audience representative to intervene. A show of hands confirms the desire of the bulk of us to see what happens next. What actually happens is some possibly unnecessary drama as Osborne hacks his way out of the box with a knife (perhaps the nurse forgot he had pocketed that scalpel from the last theatre he was in?) to land naked and foetal on the floor, then leave.

Our punishment for staring down this moment of torture is to be tortured ourselves as a false wall in the space is driven slowly and inexorably towards us. Again, we know that there’s a limit to what can be done to us as guests of Dancehouse, so aside from the claustrophobic impulse kicking in, we’re not too concerned—although the sound of oxygen cannisters being activated is disturbing. Having stared down the wall, there’s a sense of triumph and the mood lightens accordingly when a strange nippled mechanism puffing out more smoke rings and, bizarrely, reggae music, drops from the ceiling. In the end, it’s boredom with this bouncing toy that drives us to collectively call it quits.

Ashley Dyer’s desire, among other things, was to establish a place for people to watch the diverting properties of smoke. The work he’s created is indeed wonderful to watch. The confrontation that emerges from other elements of the performance that Dyer has injected lies in its testing of our intimate knowledge of theatrical convention and our reaction to what it represents. While we know that performer and audience are never really in danger (well, maybe that cigarette that Tony Osborne smokes or did we detect a herbal aroma?), what is actually called into question in this experiment is our collective capacity for distraction while ever-escalating and dastardly depictions of torture play out before us.

Choreographer Lee Serle in conversation with Keith Gallasch about P.O.V presented at Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, as part of Dance Massive 2013.

Spoiler alert. in arguing for the cogency of Skeleton the last two paragraphs of this review reveal details of the work’s ending.
The Editors.

ACCIDENTS APPARENTLY HAPPEN IN THREES. IN DANCER-CHOREOGRAPHER LARISSA MCGOWAN’S SKELETON, A DANCE THEATRE REVERIE-CUM-NIGHTMARE IN WHICH THE FRAGILITY OF THE HUMAN SKELETON IS SUBJECTED TO INSTRUMENTS OF POPULAR CULTURE (SKATEBOARDS, BMX BIKES, HIGH HEELS, BASEBALL BATS, ACTION FILMS AND NOISE-REDUCING HEADPHONES), ACCIDENT SCENES ARE CYCLICALLY REVISITED WITH INCREASING INTENSITY.

It’s important to point out that Skeleton is emphatically not in the same mould as, say, Branch Nebula’s Concrete and Bone Sessions (RT113); it is not built on the virtuosic manipulation of skateboards or BMX bikes. In Skeleton these and other cultural objects are rendered utterly iconic—chalk white fetishes, as they are in the works of visual artist Ricky Swallow, one of McGowan’s inspirers. As human scale black boxes-cum-screens automatically crisscross the stage they deposit these items on which we rest our gaze. First we see a skateboard, and then, in another pass, a man frozen in time, tilted forward on the board. Shortly we see him roll out, in slow motion, from a black box in a damaging tumble accompanied by the sound of an almighty crash rising out of Jethro Woodward’s dynamic, pop culture saturated score.

With other accidents we sometimes see the damage first. The performance opens with McGowan struggling, eloquently, to rise from the floor. Later we’ll see versions of the accident in a work where the order of cause and effect is not always obeyed, heightening the sense of obsessive reflection on a traumatic moment.

The images of the man and skateboard are typically punctuated by others in a world where people appear to be ephemeral and replaceable. At worst they relive their accidents. A man (Louis Rankin) wearing large white headphones, is hit violently on three different occasions by a rushing passerby. More than that, he disappears into a black box only to immediately reappear without the headphones but still locked into the same head-rolling dance of sonic possession.

A woman (Lisa Griffiths), appears, locked in muscle seizure. McGowan lifts her rigid frame and attempts to manipulate her back into shape. Later we’ll see Griffiths with the bike, folding herself, possibly lovingly, into it in various positions, one of which will become this rigor-mortised condition. We don’t need to see the moment of the accident; everything is conveyed with a grim physical poetry.

Manipulation of the damaged body is a significant motif in Skeleton. After our initial sighting of the writhing McGowan, she shortly reappears being extensively manipulated by a male dancer to sharp electric jabs heard in Woodrow’s score. What first appears helpful becomes threatening, in an extension of the motif, as the male repeatedly, in near slow motion, hits McGowan’s jaw. Similarly the headphone wearer is subjected to some nasty looking chiropractry by one of his fellows.

This world of gliding black boxes depositing and disappearing humans and objects is scarily fast, as is McGowan’s choreography, but there is a telling, relatively slow and sustained scene that heightens the joint themes of damage and care. To a melancholy strain from Woodrow, Tobiah Booth-Remmers rolls and shapes the rigid Griffiths with increasing aggression, as if irritated by her body’s unresponsiveness. She suddenly softens, grabs his leg; he falters and crumbles. Sitting, she creates a push/pull pieta, drawing him softly into her lap only to repel him and then draw him back. McGowan and Marcus Louend appear, duplicating this image against a cosmic hum, sharp cracks and Woodrow’s sustained melancholy half-melody (which would not have been out of place in Vangelis’ score for Bladerunner). All four struggle ineffectually to rise.

Between these darker episodes there are lighter ones which emphasise popular culture’s invitations to risk-taking and thrill-seeking—a context of perpetual danger, frequent deaths and heroic inviolability. Dancers become action heroes and villains or their bodies mutate into monstrous forms accompanied by animal roars. These are fun, amplified by the score’s plundering of soundtracks and computer gaming. But they’re not as frightening as a man swinging a baseball bat at a woman. The climax of this recurrent image has one of the men striking McGowan with the bat: shattering, it’s revealed to be a sculpted object. Here it’s the perpetrator we watch: unable to shake free the handle of the bat, so much is it a part of him, he succumbs to a mad dance of possession until finally flinging it into the upstage grid.

It’s the final stage of Skeleton where the work, after too many action scenes, achieves the thematic fruition that McGowan and co-director Sam Haren were doubtless aiming for with the completion of the ‘damage and care’ motif and now an evocation of not just the breaking of bones, but also the smashing of icons. We see the front wheel of the BMX shatter into plaster—this at last is Griffiths’ accident. The skateboard appears, shockingly, to crack of its own accord. The high heeled shoe, so delicately approached and negotiated by McGowan rolling, turning and slipping into it, crumbles beneath her. It’s as if, a la the dromology (the science or ‘logic’ of speed) of Paul Virilio, each of these instruments (they are all technologies—even the bat offers prosthetic reach) incorporates its own accident, damaging itself and its user. Louis Rankin, though, reminds us that the skeleton is likewise a piece of fragile technology as a rush of plaster pieces tumble from his t-shirt. After a final burst of violent energy the dancers, left only with the culture of fight, all fall down.

I first saw Skeleton at this year’s Adelaide Festival. Seeing it again, I enjoyed it even more if doubtful about the extent of the action scenes and uncertain of their full significance. If McGowan is as wise as Garry Stewart—she performed for many years with his Australian Dance Theatre, becoming his assistant choreographer—she will, with Haren, continue to develop Skeleton. There’s no doubt that McGowan’s choreography reflects Stewart’s in its speed, precision and the melding of dance and other movement forms, and with a focus on ideas. This, her first major work, reveals intelligence, thematic integrity and a potent sense of theatre magic, if at times the desire to amuse risks undercutting Skeleton’s seriousness, expressed most strongly in the ambivalence portrayed concerning our attitude to the pain of others—it’s meaninglessness in action films, and the tension between concern and denial in reality, yielding even cruelty.

The dancers are superb, the design innovative (without being hi-tech: two stage hands manage the boxes from inside), the lighting especially deft (given the demands of the boxes) and the sound richly apt and, towards the end, much more than that. And the modelling of the objects is a delight.

What do the black screens/boxes represent beyond clever stage technology? Like the upstage wall they are neatly gridded. They move in fixed trajectories, fast and slow. They appear to be automatons. Like digital devices they deliver a ceaseless flow of images new, reworked and appropriated; like humble versions of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, they play with time and perception. As chaotic as the world of the internet can appear it nonetheless comprises often rigid networks and grids (including the machinations of corporatised popular culture) against which we act out our fragile lives and suffer their accidents.

McGowan sees Skeleton as a reflection on growing up in the 1980s with the cultural objects that possessed a generation, and their implications for the body, and presumably the psyche given that Skeleton is about more than broken bones (see interview). The design of Skeleton allows McGowan and her collaborators to replay and review, cut and paste the pleasures and traumas of youth with a three-dimensionality and physical and lo-tech immediacy still beyond the reach of digital media. The Skeleton team have made an analog machine for reflection, albeit one with all the speed and rapid cutting of its digital peers.

SOME DISCLAIMERS ARE IN ORDER. I UNINTENTIONALLY SAW 247 DAYS AS A PREVIEW PERFORMANCE. I SAT NEXT TO THE CHOREOGRAPHER AS SHE SCRIBBLED NOTES INTO HER SMALL NOTEPAD, AND FELT AN ENORMOUS PRESSURE TO READ THE POTENTIAL OF THE WORK GENEROUSLY. TO MAKE MATTERS SLIGHTLY MORE COMPLICATED, IT WAS MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE CHOREOGRAPHER’S WORK.

Anouk van Dijk, the new artistic director of Chunky Move, has called this her first ‘real’ Australian choreography. Among the very few clarificatory program notes, van Dijk writes “247 days is the time it takes for a choreographic work to gestate.” 247 is also the number of days she has spent in Australia. It is, thus, a choreography made entirely out of Australia, its effect on van Dijk’s body, psyche, heart. (There is a kernel of an old idea here, something I first heard said in Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I (2000): our body constantly regenerates all its cells, and so, every so often, we become new people, even to ourselves.)

I had not seen any of Anouk van Dijk’s choreographies—neither in Australia, nor in Europe —and consequently had no ability to tell the Australian cells apart from the European ones. All I knew was that van Dijk’s Chunky Move debut, An Act of Now [RT112] explored human connection, and that there was a Tanztheater collaboration with Falk Richter in Schaubühne’s repertoire titled TRUST [RT95]. It felt like a letdown, therefore, to watch a choreography unfold thematically into quite literally the only thing I expected: trust and human connection. [See Philipa Rothfield’s interview with van Dijk.]

Tara Soh, James Pham, Lauren Langlois, Leif Helland, Niharika Senapati, Alya Manzart, 247 Days, Chunky Move

Six 20-something multiracial dancers—a welcome departure from the pervasive all-whiteness of the Chunky Move ensemble I had come to expect—delve deeply into their bodies to articulate the physicality of four distinct relationships between the individual and their social surroundings: freedom, loneliness, constraint, connection. The set is a semi-circular full-height mirror, broken into segments so that, curiously, not only is the audience not reflected back to itself, but the dancers often have no reflection either. If ever there was an accurate articulation of finding oneself in a foreign place, unable to establish a relationship with one’s surroundings that would provide legible feedback on identity, here it was. There is no easy mirroring back, when one is a stranger: an epistemological aloneness develops. Within the set’s twisting, opening, folding into screens or dressing-room cubicles, the dancers veer between obsessive self-analysis and chasing their own, fleeting image.

The work is peppered with voice: from inarticulate cursing to a soundscape-forming cacophony, to first-person confessionals. The entire tradition of Tanztheater forces me to understand this as self-expression, not performance, and I was frustrated by the banality of so many utterances (“When I feel lonely, I…”), while the more potentially interesting ones were so often drowned to illegibility in polyphony. A number of points are progressively woven together: belonging (what happens when your family leaves Australia, and you stay?), coming out (and the negotiation of individual, familial and social self), and glimpses of questions that made sense to me, but not necessarily to the work. Are we attracted to people who look like us, because we want to be them, not stricto sensu love them? The naivete was grating, yet fitting: the more one tries to approach a foreign environment—be it a new country, or a new erotic community—with openness, the more one is willing to be infected with influence, the more one reverts to the somewhat idiotic ontological uncertainty of adolescence.

James Pham, Leif Helland, Lauren Langlois, Niharika Senapati, Niharika Senapati, Alya Manzart, 247 Days, Chunky Move

Much of the movement is contactless, shifting from shielding invisible constraints to self-propelled freedom, to narcissistic attempts to please the mirror. Van Dijk’s own philosophy of counter-technique, a training of the body to lose its upright axis and open itself to imbalance, subjects these unheld, uncaught, unembraced bodies to so much vulnerability. The choreography, however, comes together most satisfyingly in duets and trios, in which Van Dijk’s emphasis on bodies’ openness to external force is at its most articulate. One phenomenal male duet pairs a strong, controlling body (Leif Helland) with a rolling, soft one (James Pham). As Helland embraces and drops, folds and envelops Pham, moving purposefully outside his own centre of gravity, something deep and fundamental about our need to be held, supported and empowered through care shines through. (One wonders, additionally, given the times we live in, where are the same-sex duets in contemporary dance?)

247 Days ends on a weak note. Given the strength with which many works in Dance Massive have turned stage sound into sound design, I hoped for a more careful integration of voice into the work. At times 247 Days left me cold, but when it worked, it was powerful and, after all, I was watching a preview.

ACCORDING TO MICHEL FOUCAULT, DISSECTION OFFERED MODERN MEDICINE A CERTAIN CONCEPTION OF THE BODY, THE RESULT OF OPENING IT UP TO THE SCALPEL. FOUCAULT’S POINT IS THAT SLICING THE BODY IN THIS WAY CREATED A MODE OF THOUGHT. SANDRA PARKER’S THE RECORDING MAKES ITS OWN CUT INTO THE FIELD OF FILM AND MOVEMENT.

The room is a tableau of ladders, lights, microphones, cases, monitors and screens. It is a mise en scène. We are inside a set, in the middle of something. The lighting designer (Jenny Hector), composer (Steve Heather) and audio visual operator (Chris Wenn) are visible, working to the side. House lights are up. It is as if these people have been at it for days. We are not there.

Three performers wander the set, absorbed in whatever it is that they are up to. A series of travails follows. Scripts flutter, lighting is positioned, ready for an enactment of sorts: a rehearsal or maybe the real deal. The ensuing action is projected onscreen. No words are spoken. Contextual cues suggest that there is a drama within and between these ‘actors.’

Each person has a solo: the face in close-up onscreen while we watch the body perform. An emotional tenor is expressed in the torso, gestures, postural tableaus, arms and legs which incline this way and that. Our perspective on the performer before us is rather different to what we see on screen. It is as if two events are happening, not one.

Fiona Cameron looks directly at the camera, almost without affect. We have to search for meaning through corporeal cues. Trevor Patrick’s face likewise betrays little of his movement. Is this what people are like? Deleuze writes of the face as distinct from the head. The face is composed. It is a social and cultural product, whereas the head is open to a plethora of forces. The head deconstructs the face. The Recording offers a view somewhere between these two conceptions: the faces that we see on the screen are not naturalistic. They are evacuated, not of thought exactly, but something of the everyday has been taken away. They offer themselves to the camera, to the audience, a cipher to be analysed. The face becomes a head.

What happens in the body is key. We, the audience are privy to a multiplicity of gestures, the serial embodiment of feelings and interactive dramas which we see in the flesh. A collage of dialogue from crime shows is played. It is fulsome, complete, in contrast to the pared back action we observe.

The trio interact explosively. Two people land on the floor, one upon the other. The third (Phoebe Robinson) gesticulates towards them. Audio visual operator Chris Wenn speaks out, offering direction which has been notably absent in this film set, calling for a repeat of the action. We watch Fiona Cameron fall and fall and fall, initially underneath Trevor Patrick but later alone. Finally, we see Phoebe Robinson frame the event with her indicative arms, pulses of emotion. This happens again and again. She is the child of the event, watching an enigmatic primal scene.

Unlike Hollywood film, the narrative drama between these three people is not the centre of the action, which is displaced, split up and distributed between several nodes: the perspective of the screen, the atmosphere generated by the music, the bodies beyond the screen, their distal interiority, and finally, the space between all these elements in their differences.

The trace of The Recording is not that which is preserved on tape. It is the impression left on us. Scraping back the usual surfaces of cinema, The Recording offers a view of the body flying beneath the radar of cinematic visibility. This is a world of quiet intensities and silent behaviours, a place where feelings originate. Parker allows for these alternative depths, she seeks them out. Although not part of the everyday, they are its alter ego, the other side of familiarity. If mainstream film is a place of recognition, The Recording is not. It offers a corporeal uncanny carefully constructed from the bare bones of the film studio.

Dalisa Pigram in conversation with Keith Gallasch about Gudirr Gudirr presented by Arts House & Marrugeku for Dance Massive 2013.

Stephanie Lake in conversation with Keith Gallasch about her work Dual, co-presented with Arts House, for Dance Massive 2013.

DUAL, SAYS CHOREOGRAPHER STEPHANIE LAKE, IS A PUZZLE OR MATHEMATICAL EQUATION WHERE 1 + 1 DOESN’T NECESSARILY EQUAL THE SUM OF ITS PARTS (PROGRAM NOTE). IT ALL SOUNDS A BIT LEFT BRAIN BUT IS ACTUALLY A SIMPLE IDEA—TWO SOLOS WHOSE PERPLEXING PIECES CLICK TOGETHER IN THE THIRD ACT.

Even knowing the premise of the dance, there was a collective moment when the neat synthesis in the third act became apparent. Dual looks at union, what is lost and gained when two become one, or when one and one become two—however you choose to look at it.

Dual seems to play on its phonic proximity to ‘duel’—a combat between two individuals. Pulsing, unrelenting electronic beats set the scene for the first solo, performed by Alisdair Macindoe. The frantic, street-style moves of the opening minutes made me think of a dance battle. Macindoe has seizure-like interactions with the music, shaking violently then switching to perform a break dancing hand glide or an arabesque. The energy required for this solo is on another level—Macindoe displays control amid the blistering and chaotic pace. As he slows down to a piano composition we begin to pick up mime-like gestures, his hands interacting with the invisible.

That invisible element, we later see, is the female soloist Sara Black who displays both grit and a nervy tic in her performance. The string composition that accompanies her piece is discordant and her shoulder rolls and hip thrusts are every bit as tightly wound as in the preceding solo. Though slight, her musculature and her matching Macindoe’s speed and energy skirted associations of yin and yang duality. Initially, I thought the dance would avoid the prescribed male/female strength and weakness ‘coming together.’ There are frequent pauses when Black wears a blank, blinking stare, as though she is trying to make sense of the intangible. Through this strangeness, the solo choreography seems to grant the dancers an overarching individuality unrelated to gender. Then there are times when Black’s rigid, shaking body is akin to a rag doll and there’s a sense of foreboding when the music switches to gun shot drumming.

Robin Fox weaves the beats and strings from the two solos together in the third act. It’s not a perfect marriage; there is still something unsettled and frantic about the combination that begs questions. The physical proximity and constant contact that pervades the third act is immediately heralded with a lift. Black leaps and curls up in Macindoe’s arms. Later she poignantly touches his foot. In her solo, her fingers would have been brushing the air. While the moves of the dancers gain meaning we see their solos lose their surreal and idiosyncratic qualities.

The presence of the formerly absent partner reveals the complete mirroring of roles—Black’s blank staring is now at Macindoe and in this third act, gender plays a more telling role. Black is lying on her stomach, lifting her back or leg off the ground. Macindoe restricts her movements by pushing her body back to the floor. It is a brutal moment without being overtly violent, the movements carefully arranged to steer clear of cliché. Lake presents a story every bit as confusing, fraught and fragile as any relationship; the two sides—a soaring lift or a cruel push back to earth—are presented without her own conclusions weighing in. Never breaking into a duel, the duet is about a push and pull, best exemplified when the dancers stand across from each other taking turns to breathe in and out as though one organism.

SKELETON IS A STRUGGLE BETWEEN STRENGTH AND FRAGILITY. LIKE ITS NAMESAKE, THE PRODUCTION ITSELF IS HARD BUT BRITTLE. HARD IN THE DEMANDS IT PLACES ON THE ATHLETIC DANCERS, BRITTLE IN ITS UNDERNOURISHED OVERALL VISION.

The work draws inspiration from Ricky Swallow’s sculptures, specifically those involving skulls and 80s paraphernalia. This is a tricky point to leap from. A vital feature of Swallow’s art is his ironic use of monumentality—making the unimportant extravagantly important, the practical completely impractical. It is a feature that is, to a certain extent, predicated on his medium, which is static and timeless. The theatre—kinetic and ephemeral—is a different beast entirely.

Nevertheless, Larissa McGowan and Sam Haren’s subsequent vision for Skeleton is of an “archaeological puzzle” that fleshes out the human frame with the muscle of pop culture. Unfortunately, the skeleton and the muscle end up running parallel. McGowan’s choreography carves out the physical concreteness of the skeleton in the present tense, whereas the pop culture exists merely as artefact, never truly coming alive. These artefacts include an all-white BMX that directly quotes Swallow’s famous 1999 work “Peugeot Taipan, Commemorative Model (Discontinued Line).” Lisa Griffiths’ intricate dance with the bike is expert in its execution but the interaction is not affecting, for her or for us. The archaeology of culture is not merely the digging up of urns, it is also the contextualising of the urn. And, though the props are skateboards and stilettos and the sound design is littered with Nintendo bleeps and horror movie howls, the work as a whole fails to build a context for these references, stripping them of meaning.

McGowan’s choreography bears the hallmarks of her time with Australian Dance Theatre. It is fast, explosive and at its best when the speed and forcefulness catch the viewer by surprise. Softness is not part of the vocabulary, nor should it be, given the subject matter. McGowan extends the dancers’ bodies as though from within them, the internal physical mechanics becoming apparent. And there seems to be a recurring motif of bodily disassociation, where the intention of the mind and the action of the body run counter to one another. We see this in Lewis Rankin’s frenzied solo, in Griffiths’ suddenly stiffened muscles. The choreographic language is rooted in the mechanical and, importantly, it is firmly internal.

The dynamics between the dancers are similarly mechanical. There is no engagement, nor relationship between them beyond emotionless grappling. This isolates the dancers from one another, creating spatial pockets of action rather than a stage full of tension, love, contempt or any other of a host of intangibles that can imbue the space between people with meaning. This, in itself, is not necessarily a negative, but the isolation here feeds into the larger, more crucial problem of the show’s parallel themes not interacting.

Skeleton promises most when it is at its most playful. Jonathon Oxlade’s design is perhaps too rigorously geometrical but the black screens that whisk across the stage are a brilliant creation. Silent and smooth, the screens deposit dancers and props in place or clean them up on their way out. They are a physical manifestation of a film edit, all the more appealing for their simplicity. Their use is effective as a way of quickly altering the space, but their potential is most apparent when reinventing images as though by magic. In these instances, the pop film language that the screens nod to is given its due weight but more could have been made of these opportunities.

Similarly, Jethro Woodward’s sound design is often a remarkable assault of mashed-up film foley sounds. The splatter, the gore, the piercing screams are punched together so quickly that they become their own delicious music. However, as they lose their distinctness they also lose some of their ironic humour and the chance to juxtapose contrary or incongruous references is also missed. Occasionally, the engagement between the dancers’ bodies and the score approaches the well-worn path of fighting to sound effects (recall the martial arts scene of Chunky Move’sTense Dave, 2003). McGowan steers away from that course for the most part, but the result feels like a compromise rather than a strong alternative.

In the end, the real strengths of Skeleton—the internal electricity of McGowan’s choreography, the dedication of the dancers, the magic of the black screens—cannot sustain a full-length show. The bones are willing but the flesh is weak.

Dance Massive, Malthouse: Skeleton, choreographer Larissa McGowan, directors Sam Haren, Larissa McGowan, performers Tobiah Booth-Remmers, Lisa Griffiths, Marcus Louend, Larissa McGowan, Lewis Rankin, set, costume design Jonathon Oxlade, lighting Bosco Shaw, Bluebottle, composer: Jethro Woodward, producer Freya Waterson, Insite Arts, Beckett Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne, March 14 – 23; http://dancemassive.com.au/

SEEN FROM ON HIGH, HUMAN LIFE CAN SEEM ALMOST ABSTRACT. PERHAPS THAT’S WHY THE GREEK GODS WERE SO UNCARING. IT’S DIFFERENT UP CLOSE. EVEN MORESO WHEN YOU’RE IN THE THICK OF IT.

Lee Serle looked down upon the busy streets of New York, musing: “What if things were different? What if people stopped going about their daily business and dallied with each other?” Not likely in 21st century New York, but this is art, not life.

The performance space is filled with black stools forming clear lines. We could play tic tac toe. The rest of the seating is lined up at either end of the performance space, gently inclining towards the stools. Audience members scramble to gain a spot in the midst of the action, spinning and watching each other with glee. We are the lucky ones, the anticipation is palpable.

Four performers dance along runways created between the rows of stools. Their movement is very Trisha Brown (Serle’s mentor, courtesy of a Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts initiative). Lines of motion, open jointed, translate from feet through to hip socket, fast shifts of weight, unhindered by excessive muscular tension. Some movements begin at the distal edges of the limbs, others with the torso. Bodies give way to gravity, slap the floor, then move on. No rest, just motion back and forth.

As time goes by, lap pool lines turn into curves, circling the stools that mark the end of each row. Dancers team up with each other, forming partnerships on the run, fast but free. The people on the stools must choose: whether to let the movement flow past them without following it or to keep their eyes on the dancer. I began by swivelling my seat so as to follow the dancing but then I let the movement occupy my peripheral vision, feeling less compelled to watch the detail of the movement than to allow the experience of space and bodies passing by to wash over me. There is a certain emphasis on the perceptual agency of the audience, not only to choose how to watch but to reflect upon the impact of that choosing.

A lean backwards for the dancers becomes a fall becomes a run forwards. Some bodies are more able than others to let go enough to fall off centre. It all happens very fast but the transmission of forces in this kind of work requires an openness in the joints to allow instead the directional tendencies of the choreography to occur. There is also a muscularity in the arm swings and especially the leg lifts which leaves the group panting on the floor. This marks a break in the action. The performers get up, wipe away rivulets of sweat and mosey on off. They are human now.

What follows is a series of one-on-one interactions between the performers and those audience members who are sitting on the stools. It begins with an approach, whispers no one else can hear. A variety of more theatrical events ensue; a back massage, a foot spa, a slow waltz, a promenade around the room. Each interaction is closely watched by the audience. Some moves are played for laughs. Dancers are good at exaggerated disco dancing: Kristy Ayres performs for an audience member, each wearing headphones, sharing the music. One of the nicest interactions occurs between Lily Paskas and an audience participant. Continually asking whether her weight feels okay, Paskas leans, drapes and pours herself onto her seated accomplice, who participates in this duet without artifice. The result is quite beautiful.

The drama and comedy of this section has ultimately to end. Somehow the performers gather themselves to return to their performance personas, intentionally impersonal. The compass of their bodies rotates, achieved through face and arms, spinal spirals, legs and feet incrementally shifting position. Their true bearing rotates at an even pace as limbs and torso work together to achieve their goal. Life returns to the grid.

Audience participation is nothing new. What P.O.V. highlights is the perspectival nature of perception and the ways in which this differs from situation to situation. This isn’t just a question of proximity. People became emotionally charged, especially when the subject of the interactions. They lit up, they were uncomfortable, thrilled, amused, bemused.

P.O.V. is an experiential piece, for its audience rather than itself. In that sense, it was rewarded by its reception, by the laughter and the ripples of attention. There’s nothing like getting the audience on side. Even better if they’re in the middle.

WHEN DALISA PIGRAM TAKES A WELL-EARNED BOW AT THE END OF GUDIRR GUDIRR, INVITING A LINE OF COLLABORATORS TO JOIN HER, WE ARE SUDDENLY AWARE OF HER DIMINUTIVE STATURE.

For a solo, this is one BIG performance. Accompanied by video projected onto a corrugated iron wall upstage and a long fishing net suspended from the ceiling, Pigram otherwise fills the space for 60 minutes with her intense presence. Gudirr Gudirr (the words call a warning) is a powerful commentary on life in multi-racial Australia told through the experience of this dancer who has a Malay father and Aboriginal mother and lives and works in the country’s north-west. From time to time, the video reminds us of the locale with at once calming and unsettling images of the place and its people.

In a projection of the text, we’re reminded once more of Australia’s racist history. In 1928 an official informs A. O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aboriginals in Western Australia (1875-1954) that quarter-caste Indigenous people (“quadroons”) will be “useful in replacing Aboriginals” as labour for the industries of the north. For this reason, Broome is exempted from the odious White Australia Policy. Pigram appears in fighting stance then moves on to describe in a mix of Yawuru language, Aboriginal English and vivid gesture a joyous experience of fishing with her family that turns dangerous as they overfill their net and are threatened by a crocodile. Harvesting only what’s needed is just one of the survival lessons learned.

From exuberant recreation, Pigram shifts deftly through a parodic airline steward sequence to a series of multi-faceted choreographies variously expressing frustration, resistance, despair, forbearance and celebration. Contained within a strong and compact body her dance mixes Malaysian martial manoeuvres (Silat)—anchored by a low centre of gravity with extended leg and expressive arms—with stances we have come to know from Indigenous dance—solidly grounded feet, torso and hips suddenly and sharply changing plane and aspect, references to animal movement. Moving easily between these forms—a martial stance is enlivened with a quick, animal flick of the wrist—Pigram displays a light-footed grace and a sharp-eyed focus that holds us keenly on her wavelength.

At other times she is all muscle and strength deploying the acrobatic skills that are part of Marrugeku’s house style. The suspended net is used to map the space in myriad ways. At one point Pigram deploys it as tissu apparatus, hooking her feet into its threads, executing a series of difficult staccato moves through the fabric to end hanging upside down like the day’s haul. Though we’ve seen it so often, we still catch our breath as she falls, relaxing as she playfully swings from the net, sizing us up.

In the program notes, Pigram describes the generation of these shifting gestures and personas as resulting in part from the ‘task-based process’ she embarked on with director and co-choreographer Koen Augustijnen—a regular collaborator on Marrugeku projects who has also worked with Alain Platel’s Les ballets c de la b—and which together they named “The Tide is Turning.” Says Pigram: “I explore the point in my memory where it felt like my community was changing. I interpret this time through a range of ‘movement channels’ inspired by different characters. Following the task to ‘change the channels,’ I am introducing myself, and others from my community, from the inside out. The audience may see what’s inside of me. They may see the issues that I have that exist as inspirations and concerns through the movement of these characters until they are left with just a person before them, with a story.”

Disoriented movement matches angry verbiage as Pigram proselytises from the stage about the pressing need for action on Indigenous issues and follows up with a funny and expletive filled outburst, complete with waving arms, head-banging and huge projected FUCKEN text!, in sheer frustration at the time it’s taking for justice and fairness to prevail. Mood shifts again as we witness video of young Indigenous boys fighting one another—images they display proudly on Facebook. Pigram is still, facing us directly, silently wringing her hands, and then slapping her own face. In one month alone in 2010, seven young people in Pigram’s community killed themselves, the youngest 13 years old.

The work concludes with projected portraits of relatives and friends who form an important part of Pigram’s community, women and children, elders including a white haired man we’ve seen earlier dancing slowly on the screen, and finally the familiar bearded countenance of cultural advisor on this and other Marrugeku projects, Patrick Dodson. Stephen Pigram’s song provides soothing accompaniment as Dalisa Pigram repeats a sequence of calming hand gestures seen earlier on screen.

Gudirr Gudirr is a truly timely work that should be seen widely. Showing all the signs of careful collaboration from a gifted team it conveys complex experience in the shape of Dalisa Pigram who shows us in the sharply shifting facets of her performance the rich and troubled life of her community and of this country.

P.O.V., IS, FOR THE MOST PART, VERY SATISFYING TO WATCH. SERLE —ONE OF THOSE DANCERS MELBOURNE KNOWS WELL FROM REGULAR APPEARANCES AT NEXT WAVE AND IN THE WORKS OF LUCY GUERIN INC AND CHUNKY MOVE—DEVELOPED P.O.V IN NEW YORK UNDER THE MENTORSHIP OF TRISHA BROWN, AS A PART OF THE ROLEX MENTOR AND PROTEGE ARTS INITIATIVE.

I have a personal liking for New York contemporary: I adore its rigorous, yet unpretentious simplicity. Across the board, it possesses a humility and matter-of-factness that are equally disarming in Europe and in Australia, and it is somehow able to withstand a cynical as well as a philistine eye. By whittling away all ornament, but never getting too bogged down in illustrating esoteric texts (as has happened in Europe), it is as if the American dancers never quite bush-bashed their way through tradition all the way into a settled, comfortable arrogance, but remained suspended in a state of focused, ambitious play. This approach appears in Melbourne dance in visible traces, through echoes of training and influence, in the works of BalletLab and Luke George. Unavoidably, P.O.V. too has arrived back from the US seeped in Trisha Brown’s aesthetic and ethic, clearly as the work of a young artist shaped heavily by a master builder.

Serle seats (some of) the audience on 36 swivel stools that dot the stage in orderly intervals. Four dancers—Serle, Lily Paskas, Kristy Ayre, James Andrews—travel between them, through the grid of aisles. It becomes immediately clear that where you sit will determine your experience—I felt a none-too-subtle nudge in my semiotic ribs—and, having arrived too late for a coveted stage seat, I perched on top of the seating bank, getting a nice, rounded overview of the piece. (It is to the show’s credit that every reviewer of P.O.V. so far has specified where they sat.)

There are three distinct parts to the choreography. In the first, the four dancers traverse the space between people in an orderly formation, performing a mesmerising score—very Brown—of simple, pendular movements that gently roll their weight up and down the aisles. At times, the choreography looks like tightly stitched-together pieces of athletic sports, with segments of continuous movement blending into one another in surprising ways: the momentum-building squat of a distance runner morphs into the swirl of the discus or javelin thrower, or into the oblique leap of a high jumper. Sequences keep unfolding instead of halting and turning, the dancers’ formation growing in mathematical complexity, while the spectators swivel their chairs to watch. It looks like the patterns of pedestrians in a city; it also looks like a complex collage of film footage from Olympics documentaries and newsreels. It is utterly beautiful in the way of abstract flows.

In the second part, the dancers step out of performer aloofness and approach the audience members, increasingly intrusively. Some are stared at, some get a surprise massage, one is briefly blindfolded, another has her feet washed, one is shown something on a tablet, some are taken offstage, one is given wine and a chat with all of the dancers. Ayre gives a set of headphones to a woman, takes another set, and performs a little private dance (funny, almost like a parody of a lap dance) to the music only they can hear. Serle repeats this with another audience member, but his dance involves a great deal of animal poses. Paskas stretches herself gently over a man. As audience interaction, this is not so much about letting other people into the performance—there is no ceding of control, ever—as it is about multiplying, unweaving the energy lines between the stage and the audience. The main effect is not for a multitude of spectators to have a meaningful individual experience (they do not), but to complicate the audience focus from a straight phalanx of one-way looks to a knot, a jumble of sight lines with different levels of energy, stress, comfort, feeling of inclusion or exclusion, and amusement.

The second part is in some ways the weakest, because it relies on trivial tropes of audience engagement: singing to them, touching them slightly awkwardly, as well as having conversations designed only to look like conversations from far away. It takes part three to demonstrate that something more has been achieved. The dancers return to their dance, their path through the swivel-stool grid now circular, simplified. Their movements have become smaller, gentler, introverted—and also more twee, wristy: more Lucy Guerin than Trisha Brown—but the most noticeable shift is in how our attention has softened. The barriers separating the dancers from the audience have glaringly thinned, the energy in the room is completely different. Like a street after an incident—a burst pipe, a found pet—has made us all talk to each other.

P.O.V. is clearly an apprentice’s graduating piece. The title sums up its exploratory horizons, and it reproduces Brown’s body language without showing how Serle is a creative mind of his own. Where it deviates, it pulls back in the influences and mannerisms of Obarzanek and Guerin, and chooses easy paths, such as humorous tropes. However, for as long as it is able to resist its own striving to busy itself up with features, for as long as it can stay disciplined and clear-headed, P.O.V. is immensely satisfying.

TWO VERY DIFFERENT BODIES, QUITE DIFFERENTLY ATTIRED, TWO SOLOS, SEEMINGLY IDENTICAL, AND A THIRD DANCE BRINGING THE TWO PERFORMERS TOGETHER COMPRISE CHOREOGRAPHER STEPHANIE LAKE’S DIALECTICAL DUAL, A RIVETING PHYSICAL AND AURAL EXPLORATION OF AFFINITY AND DIFFERENCE.

The exactness of the movement in Dual evokes loss of control. In consecutive solos, two humans (Alisdair Macindoe, Sara Black)—they could be animals or trees or wind-whipped newspaper—are buffeted by the unseen but intensely audible forces of Robin Fox’s score. These range from subtle to brutal: bird calls, scratched guitar strings, a gentle Kodaly-ish ostinato, a raging, eerily synthetic storm, heart-palpitating thumps, rushes of industrial sound and a sublimely haunting, oscillating, ever escalating organ tone. The bodies register the impact, vibrating furiously, lurching, bouncing, spinning off-kilter, jolted, falling, slumping, spastically discombobulated. These involuntarily spasms are occasionally countered by determined actions (evasive gestures, vocal noise spat across the traverse stage), but at whom or what are they directed?

For all the suggestiveness of the choreography and the sound score, the solos of Dual are fascinatingly abstract, yielding an immersive poetry of reaction and instability witnessed at close quarters. As well, for all their equivalence, the solos are tonally quite different: Alistair Macindoe’s solid frame and everyday clothing, Black’s lean physiognomy and dance rehearsal wear; a more abrasive score for Macindoe, guitar and bird calls for Black (although they share major sonic motifs); and the distinctive essence of each dancer in and beyond the choreography—Macindoe’s firm, rooted gracefulness and sudden lightness, Black’s elegant, arching sinuousness and quivering vibrancy. These differences yield strikingly discrete solos from similar material, preparing us for what comes next.

Macindoe performs first, then Black. Now the two stand side by side in a rare moment of stillness before solos mutate into duet, where hitherto unidentified forces become increasingly literal without ever quite losing the strangeness of the initial abstraction. The two bodies draw closer and closer, more often in tension and conflict than in intimacy—the unseen forces in the solos now made visibly human, and inevitably, given the tonalities delineated above and the casting of a male and a female dancer, an inescapable aura of heterosexual co-dependency emerges, replete with a final image of, at last, full embrace and apparent resolution.

Without touching, the dancers exert enormous pressure on each other as if by emotional osmosis, so that when touch comes it is electric. Black trips Macindoe up with repeated kicks from behind; Macindoe holds Black to the floor, pushing down on hand, foot and hip and she slowly attempts to rise, reminding us of the deep waves of movement undulating through her body in the solo.

Compounding this complicating togetherness is Robin Fox’s melding of his scores into one for the duet, a strange aural experience that heightens the difference between acoustic and electronic elements (and between the performers) without undercutting the power of the major motifs which suggest the personae of the dancers suffer the same emotional condition. Same, same but different.

Despite the moment in which the pair toss identifiable sounds at each other, Dual is revealed in its third act to be about embodied, unspoken emotional entanglement. Now we look back to the solos that comprise the first two acts and see them for the suffering and bewilderment that they are in a work that is not dance theatre but oscillates finally between the abstract and the literal, making poetry of pain.

Lake’s choreography and the dancers’ execution of it is bracing with its wealth of quickfire detail and powerful recurrent images—evanescent while articulately shaped, adding greatly to Dual’s pervasive sense of lone vulnerability and fragile, raw mutuality. This collaboration between Stephanie Lake and Robin Fox has yielded a memorable, visceral work, at once strange and familiar and brilliantly performed.

ENTANGLED, ASLEEP IN THE STREET, A MAN AND WOMAN SLOWLY WAKE TO THE SOUND OF PERPETUAL DOWNPOUR AND RACKING STORM, CLOUDS WASHING OVER THE WALL AND THE ROAD THEY MOMENTARILY OCCUPY. THESE SILVERY, CHARCOAL BURNISHED CREATURES ESCHEW CONVENTIONAL HUMAN MOVEMENT AND INTIMACY FOR RITUALISTIC SYNCHRONICITY AND STRANGE SIGNALLING.

Squatting, arms swinging wide, mirroring each other, the pair gradually reach for two small spray cans to rapidly mark out, in brilliant white, circles on the ground around them and tribalistic lines across their faces. A mechanistic ritual of preparation appears to be complete.

What ensues is the furious making of a piece of art the length of the wall. In a curious inversion of the graffiti method, as if seen on a film negative, the pair peel away strips from the gritty, grey surface to reveal bright white lines, short and long, creating an abstract mural around two blank spaces that represent the artists’ temporary presence, subsequent absence and anonymity. Breaking the formality of their design, the two dribble fine lines of white paint down the wall, loosening the relative tightness of their composition.

In a final gesture, the graffiti becomes three-dimensional as the pair lift a piece of the footpath away, take out rolls of white tape and extend the lines on the wall to the ground. Carefully extricating themselves, they move to the far side of their creation where—kneeling, arms extended, gesturing at and contemplating their creation—they disappear.

More than romanticising graffiti artists, Black Project 1, not unlike Lucy Guerin’s masterwork, Structure and Sadness (2006), is about the making of art—preparation, teamwork, process, completion, albeit in a setting more post-apocalyptic than contemporary. In Structure and Sadness, the creation collapses; here it remains, the residue of lives and the art instinct, a momentary three-dimensional habitat. Light pulses across it, reshaping the depth of field, giving the work a life of its own while recalling the astonishing movement and intricacies of gesture that created it.

Black Project 1 bleeds into number 2, the artwork fading to background and the storm to an insistent drumroll pitched against massive creaking and straining as we find ourselves in another dimension of Hamilton’s black world.

Instead of the unpredictable lines of the graffiti-ists, a large, projected triangle draws our attention to the downstage floor where, paralleling the open sing of Black Project 1, lie six tangled bodies, but here as an amorphous lump, indiscernibly human. If the solo performer in Gideon Obarzanek’s Glow (2006) represented an emergent organism on a dark voyage into humanity, this cluster is a cellular creature of another kind if likewise gridded by changing geometries of light—the triangle morphs into much else as the creature writhes, ravenously devours parts of itself, mutates into a many headed monster and splits into two halves. It’s a Rorschach-cum-mirror-neuron image of great power and meticulous execution: the grimness of the imagery and the almost total absence of any sense of the individual suggest devolution rather than evolution, or perhaps post-apocalyptic, mutant humanity starting out again.

As in Black Project 1, creativity appears to be at the core of this project. The creature bears down heavily on each part of itself, but is capable of huge bursts of energy. It’s like the dancing of Thriller, but eons on, morphed with breakdancing and more. And finally, it reveals another capacity. Collapsing back into itself, overlaid once more with the projected triangle, the creature lifts small metallic triangles aloft and, squirming, shapes them into a tiny pyramid at the front of the stage. The creature breaks into its component parts in a line at the base of the triangle, each member bowed low as if in prayer or adoration. The pyramid glows red.

With its final image of submission and worship, the act of creativity in Project 2 is certainly darker and more ambiguous than the one in Project 1. The provenance of the crafted, metal triangles is much more opaque than that of the humble materials of Project 1. The result is more abstract, and the pyramid, like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, hints at things cosmological—things beyond Earth and evolution that have perhaps shaped us—be they the legacy of alien overlords or creationism’s intelligent design. But there’s an element of pathos in Project 2’s ending—the pyramid is so small and the makers’ abjection so total. And there is no curtain call, so determined is the choreographer to sustain the final image and make its grim reality part of ours.

I saw Black Project 1 in Sydney Opera House’s 2010 Spring Dance (RT111). It has stayed with me indelibly, not least as an intense painterly experience. It was strange to see it again, to know and not know it and to be enveloped again by its multitudinous shades of black and grey. Project 2, impressively costumed by Paula Levis so that bodies magically meld and the metallic sheen of mask-like faces is glimpsed only now and then, is at its most powerful in its central realisation of the movement of a mutant organism. It writhes, divides, reforms, evoking cellular life and pop culture memes that connect it with our own time in a future where the capacity to create and worship, for good or bad, lives on.

Project 2 certainly doesn’t feel as complete as Project 1, its big idea not altogether as clear nor as potent as the humble agency and creativity of the artists that is central to the first work, where we could feel our own world more palpably present. Black Project 2 is a powerful and exacting work, if at times over-extended and so resolutely black—although I do recall a tiny dance of many hands at the tip of the triangle that evoked a rare moment of intimacy and playfulness. I hope Black Project 2 sooner or later evolves to become the equal of its partner. Even so, Hamilton’s is a distinctive vision, acutely realised and choreographically rich.

Dance Massive: Arts House and Antony Hamilton Projects, Black Projects 1 & 2, choreography, concept Antony Hamilton, Black Project 1: performers Antony Hamilton, Melanie Lane, video projection Olaf Meyers, music Robert Henke, Mika Vainio and Vainio and Fennesz, design Antony Hamilton; Black Project 2: performers James Batchelor, Jake Kuzma, Talitha Maslin, Jessie Oshodi, Marnie Palomares, Jess Wong, costume design Paula Levis, sound designer Alisdair Macindoe, video design Kit Webster, set construction, production Management Matthew Scott, Megafun, producer Freya Waterson, Insite Arts; Arts House, Meat Market, Melbourne, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

ASHLEY DYER’S LIFE SUPPORT TACKLES THE POLITICS OF SMOKE WITH HIGHLY INVENTIVE BRIO. WE ARE TALKING NOT MERELY OF THE PERSONAL POLITICS OF THE BODY AND HEALTH, BUT ALSO THE SOCIETAL POLITICS OF POLLUTION AND CLIMATE CHANGE. NO SMALL FEAT.

The politics begin in the foyer. When we collect our ticket we are asked three questions for which our answers are noted:

1. Are you a smoker? (2 out of 39 respondents said yes)
2. Can you hold your breath for 60 seconds? (29 respondents said yes)
3. Have you ever saved a life? (28 respondents said yes)

The statistics on smoking were inconsequential; the statistics on breath holding were empirically proven to be highly inflated; but the politics lay in the heroic nature of our audience. Two were chosen by the artists to volunteer the nature of their life saving story. Then, having heard the tales of their heroism, we, the citizens of Dancehouse, voted on who would be our leader. They would determine when the show ended—a form of representative audience participation.

In the theatre itself, the work begins with a prolonged scene of a man (Tony Osborne) smoking in a pool of light. It is impossible to escape cliché here: the practiced precision of the rollie; the sensuous intake of breath; the smoke drifting listlessly into the spotlight above; the deliberate poking of the ashtray; the fetishisation itself. One of the few clichés missing seems to be smoke rings. But on that, Dyer is ahead of the game.

Entering with what looks like a small drum, a performer stands behind the smoking man. Tapping, the drum, filled with smoke, exudes perfectly formed smoke rings. Their sticky consistency, perfect curve and persistence through the air draw approving murmurings from the audience but, though the technical achievement and ingenuity of the method are laudable, it is the incurrence of bathos that is most effective. As the smoker adopts various arch poses, the smoke rings break on his head, his fist, they surround him and undercut him, undoing the vanity of his opening scene. Caught in the shafts of light, clusters of rings seem like visions of autoluminescent jellyfish. Thus, despite the bathos, the smoke itself never loses its primal appeal nor its mystery. It is as though Dyer is suggesting: smokers come and go, but smoke itself is eternal.

The magic of smoke and its visual elasticity are perhaps too enchanting. Life Support lags when it too overtly presents smoke as effect, rather than smoke as visual language. For instance, the smoke rings are followed by smoke bubbles, which are undeniably stunning as an effect, but in terms of affect offer nothing new. At times like this, Dyer’s formal investigation and his political enquiry have not fully melded.

However, the formal enquiry is important to the political one. Initially, the lighting reveals the smoke. Later, when the smoke is denser, it reveals the lighting; it makes visible the rays, cones and striations of the design. Similarly, speakers rigged to buckets of smoke create automated smoke rings on beats. Dyer is making the invisible visible and, in so doing, draws our attention to how much we are otherwise able to overlook—how are those lights and speakers powered but for smoke?

The smoker from the opening scene is present, if not pivotal, throughout. He is eventually, with solemn ceremony, plastic-wrapped into a cage filling with smoke. The image is haunting and affecting. The choking opacity of the smoke is broken at first by a disembodied hand pressed against the plastic. At the same time, smoke machines above the audience are turned on for the first time and the back wall of the set pushes in towards us. It is a nightmarish vision of asphyxiation and I wondered if this was the time to end the show. Was our representative leader, elected on the basis of her life saving abilities, to cut short the mesmeric display to save the performer’s life?

Instead, the performer himself aborts his gassing with a slash of the plastic wrap. The back wall of the set closes in on us further, cutting off our view of the stage and, then, an object descends from the ceiling above our heads—a jaunty deus ex machina in the form of a glowing plastic sea urchin playing glitchy reggae as it descends. Apparently now was the time to end the show, though I cannot help but feel that the political agency of the citizenry might have been more seriously put to use two minutes earlier. But maybe that is the answer to Dyer’s political enquiry: you get what you vote for.

Dance Massive, Dancehouse: Life Support, lead artist Ashley Dyer, collaborators: lighting, projections designer Travis Hodgson, designer Matthew Kneale, dancer Tony Osborne, performer, sound and objects: Sam Pettigrew, designer Clare Britton, production support Bek Berger, performer John Possemato, writer, performer Sime Knezevic, presented by Dancehouse with the support of the Keir Foundation; Dancehouse, Melbourne, March 12-14; www.dancemassive.com

BACK IN 2008, ANTONY HAMILTON’S DEBUT FULL-LENGTH WORK, BLAZEBLUE ONELINE (RT85), ESTABLISHED SOME OF HIS CHOREOGRAPHIC REFERENCE POINTS: STREET DANCE, GRAFFITI, THE LINK BETWEEN THE VISUAL AND THE PHYSICAL.

In that production, the sheer bursting mass of his creative energy led to a procession of set pieces both tonally and chromatically varied. Given a large blank canvas, Hamilton threw everything on it at once. Somehow, it hung together remarkably well.

If Blazeblue Oneline was Hamilton’s thesis, then Black Projects 1 & 2 are his antithesis. Each is fascinated with the physical possibilities of mark-making and the ways in which a flat canvas can achieve three dimensions. However, where the former is ranging, the latter is taut. Where the former is exuberant, the latter is stern. Light, dark. Colourful, monochromatic. Et cetera. Hamilton has zeroed in on one section of his palette in order to go deeper rather than broader.

Black Project 1 is a study on the most minimal of variations. At first, there is nothing but a rumble. The rumble itself, if magnified, if expanded, would be discernible as a set of beats or individuated vibrations. But here it is a single sound, as large and enveloping as the sky. The set is a black wall built on top of a black floor in front of a black curtain. But none of the blacks is truly black; there is a bit more gloss here, a small scuff there. The tonal vagaries are enhanced by a subtly shifting, cloudy projection on the wall.

In his program note, Hamilton claims he set out to investigate whether it is possible to create a controlled, neutralised aesthetic environment devoid of the subjectivity of context. He readily admits he failed. However, subjectivity aside, the kind of minimalist order he seeks will always be trumped by instabilities—entropy inevitably wins. One can look to minimalist music for precedents: Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music, in which two notes on a piano are played continuously for some fifty minutes until the harmonics and tuning change entirely; or the phasing of Steve Reich’s tape loops. Given time and space, imperceptible differences become meaningful.

Hamilton’s choreography retains an austere, antihumanist formalism throughout Black Project 1. It resists any ready kind of psychological meaning making. Perhaps its only consistent symbolism comes in the paradoxical theme of erasure as revelation. The two dancers remove tape from their blackened bodies to reveal white skin, they remove tape from the walls to reveal jagged lines that are half silicone chip, half Suprematist painting. There is the potential for a political statement here, but Hamilton is too clear-eyed to step fully into any easy narrative. He remains steadfast in his investigation of tone and neutrality.

In Black Project 2, the visual language is even more restricted than in Black Project 1, though the number of dancers has tripled to six. The floor projections are almost exclusively of triangles, the costumes are identical baggy black body suits, the choreography largely limited to pivoting symmetrically about a central axis (though the dancers’ symmetry unfortunately falters in more complex choreographic phrases).

The central axis is key. The dancers slink on in front of the set of Black Project 1 and mass in a huddle. As the dominating sound design shifts from rasping solidity into fluidity, so the dancers transpose themselves into a six-headed beast, symmetrical on either side of the centre line. As they move their arms, they become a giant, animated, breathing Rorschach test. Neutrality be damned, Hamilton challenges us to project our Freudian unconscious onto the bodies of these dancers. Is this a rebuke to subjectivity? A literalising of the symbolic? Or is the reference accidental?

Black Project 2 feels less assured than the first; its connection between form and content is less coherent. The symmetry of the choreography could easily be read as a kaleidoscopic expression of fractal geometry, the projections certainly point that way. But with this colder reading of intent, how do we make sense of the moments that are not symmetrical? When one dancer falls deliberately out of line, the others quickly draw them back in. Is this a nod to the human desire for breaking machine-like rules or is it a barbed attack on the normative functions of Freudian psychotherapy? Probably neither. Rather than eschewing symbolism, here, Hamilton piles it on with a confounding thickness.

However, at the end of Black Project 2, Hamilton’s symbolism pays dividends. The six dancers reverently construct a small black pyramid to idolise. Then, in the closing moments, the pyramid vertices glow red—the only colour yet seen. While the dancers remain bowed in shadow, in the audience we find ourselves applauding a glowing red pyramid as though it really were a thing worth idolising.

THE MISQUOTATION OF TS ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS THAT OPENS YARON ZILBERMAN’S FEATURE FILM, PERFORMANCE, IS INDICATIVE OF THE FILM’S HASTY TRANSPOSITION OF A STRING QUARTET INTO THE WORLD OF THE ‘COMING OF OLD AGE’ GENRE.

Peter (Christopher Walken), a cellist and teacher at a conservatorium, begins a chamber music class with the famous lines from Burnt Norton:

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

Walken actually reads the last line as “And all is, always, now.” because the line finishes with the enjambment “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,” leaving a foot to fill up somehow. It is a shame that the poem was cut in this way because the added lines are taken from a wonderful stanza about music that could have been brought into the musical context of the film more meaningfully than the vagaries about time which feed, rather, the film’s representation of music as being made and taught through the forceful repetition of platitudes.

As Peter tells his students, Eliot wrote the poems while listening to his favourite of Beethoven’s late string quartets: the String Quartet no14 in C-sharp Minor. The seven-movement String Quartet no14 is used as a metaphor for the 25 years of Peter’s quartet, The Fugue, as it must be played through without stopping and begins with a fugue. The ‘fugal’ theme of the film basically consists in each character having an abortive love affair: the first violinist with (yawn) his student who happens to be the daughter of the second violinist and the violist; the second violinist with (yaawn) a flamenco dancer; and the violist (yaaawn) with the first violinist.

It was, however, the String Quartet no15 in A Minor that Eliot singled out for special mention. The String Quartet no15 includes the sublime slow movement written on Beethoven’s sickbed, the “Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity,” which, in its canonical structure, would have fitted the anodyne ‘fugue’ motif of the film just as well as the C-sharp Minor, as well as providing an interesting musical connection to Peter’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s early in the film.

Peter’s story is the most interesting and is unfortunately greatly elided, reappearing in a series of cutaways to his various therapies between scenes of the other players yelling at each other to “unleash their passion” or commending each other’s “depth of sound” as “the voice of a wounded soul.”

Performance was made for people who gave up violin in primary school but perhaps had dreams of being yelled at for being ‘too talented’ by a stormy bachelor of a violin teacher. If you get the cultural references then you think the film is just wrong and if you don’t get them, then why are they there?

Performance, writers Seth Grossman, Yaron Zilberman, director Yaron Zilberman, performers Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken, Mark Ivanir; Hopscotch Films, release March 14

i should have drunk more champagne, the basement, metro arts

An independent collective, The Good Room, will present the first show in The Basement, the newly renovated intimate performance space at Metro Arts. I should have drunk more champagne is a collection of 500 anonymous regrets solicited from the public that the press release tells us creates “a world of sad pandas and empty dance floors, where Verbatim meets Experiential Theatre.”
The Good Room, I should have drunk more champagne, performer/devisors Caroline Dunphy, Daniel Evans, Amy Ingram, Leah Shelton; The Basement, Metro Arts, Brisbane, March 27- April 13; www.metroarts.com.au/

onside & 6 women dance, casula powerhouse

Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Gymnasium (production still) 2010, single-channel HD video

It’s the last few weeks of Casula Powerhouse’s Onside exhibition which looks at women in sport from a cultural perspective with works by Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont, Lauren Brincat, Elvis Richardson and Deborah Kelly. As part of the forum program, De Quincey Co will present six young choreographers from The Weather Exchange Collective—Angela French, Yoka Jones, Lian Loke, Kirsten Packham, Kathryn Puie and Ellen Rijs—who will be in residence creating pieces responding to the artworks and the gallery as site.
Onside, Casula Powerhouse, till March 24; http://www.casulapowerhouse.com/exhibitions/onside.aspx; De Quincey Co, 6 Women Dance, Casula Powerhouse, March 15-16; http://dequinceyco.net/performances/7-women-dance/

group show, mka: theatre of new writing & darebin arts’ speakeasy

Dedicated to the development of new plays, MKA Theatre of New Writing always seem to do things in multiples. They recently presented three shows in the Adelaide Fringe, one of which consisted of 22 short plays, and their next production will debut the work of five new playwrights. They have also been nominated for 11 Green Room Awards in 2012 so it seems productivity will get you noticed.
Darebin Arts’ Speakeasy and MKA: Theatre of New Writing, Group Show, playwrights Maxine Mellor, Bridget Mackey, Nakkiah Lui, Chloe Martin, Leila Rodgers, directors Prue Clark, Luke Kerridge, Northcote Town Hall, March 19-30; www.mka.org.au/program/group-show; http://darebinarts.com.au/event/mka-theatre-of-new-writing-presents-group-show/

waterwheel world water day symposium

Waterwheel, the interactive collaborative platform, will shortly be presenting its second 24-hour online symposium. The event will connect 100 scientists, artists and activists in discussion and presentation around the theme “Water Memories & Tomorrow’s Landscapes.” There are key “nodes” where physical presentations will take place—Australia, Hong Kong, Tunisia, USA and Argentina—but the action can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection and Flash plug-in.
Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium, March 22-23 (24hours non-stop) http://water-wheel.net/

grant stevens, artmonth, agnsw

Video artist Grant Stevens works with the flow of water and words in two current Sydney exhibitions. Tranquility Falls, part of ArtMonth, is an outdoor projection exploring the language of personal enlightenment. Meanwhile over at the Art Gallery of NSW Stevens showers us with words of love, loss and intimacy with his piece Crushing.
Grant Stevens, Tranquility Falls & SuperMassive, intersection Ash St and Angel Place, ArtMonth, March 17-23, 5-10pm; We used to talk about love, Balnaves contemporary: photomedia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, until April 12; www.gbk.com.au/artists/grant-stevens/tranquility-falls-art-month-pop-up-exhibition

drawn from sound, spectrum gallery

Freya Zinovieff, Sydney Cathedral Choral Vespers Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Drawing

More than any other group in Australia, Perth’s Decibel ensemble has embraced the graphic score as its ‘thing.’ Not content to just write and play them, Decibel director Cat Hope has put together an exhibition celebrating the visual beauty and conceptual elegance of graphic scores by Australian artists Philip Brophy, David Young, Lindsay Vickery, Freya Zinovieff, Ron Nagorcka and Percy Grainger.
(See also Cat Hope discussing the exhibition in the Australian Music Centre’s online journal Resonate.)
Drawn from Sound, Spectrum Project Space, Edith Cowan University, Perth, March 28-April 12; http://www.drawnfromsound.com/

melbourne queer film festival

If the fashion, comedy and dance festivals in Melbourne in March aren’t enough perhaps the Queer Film Festival will sate your appetite. There are over 169 films and events over 11 days including international features such as Gayby (Jonathan Lisecki, US) and new Australian films Submerge (Sophie O’Connor) and Being Brendo (Colin Batrouney, Shannon Murphy and Neil Armfield). The documentary program looks particularly juicy, covering activists in Uganda, gay Seventh-Day Adventists and electro-clash artist Peaches. There are also shorts, practical panels and a Queer History Slideshow.
Melbourne queer film festival, director Lisa Daniel, ACMI, Hoyts Melbourne Central and Loop Bar and cinema, March 14-24; www.mqff.com.au

message sticks

Message Sticks is the Sydney Opera House’s annual celebration of Indigenous culture. Along with a full program of music and dance, there will be two days of free film screenings featuring the documentaries Croker Island Exodus, Coniston and Black Man’s Houses as well as shorts concentrating on Indigenous issues in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Each of the screenings will be followed by Q&As. There’s also a feisty talks program including a head to head on Aboriginal Identity with Fiona Foley and Djon Mundine.
Message Sticks, director Rhoda Roberts, March 19-24; http://messagesticks.sydneyoperahouse.com/

maerzmusik, berlin

For adventure seekers in Berlin (and we know there are a lot of you), March means music with the unambiguously titled MaerzMusic festival. The event is curated around three themes one of which is Percussion, featuring Melbourne’s Speak Percussion with a program of works by Australian composers Anthony Pateras, Thomas Meadowcroft, Rohan Drape and Matthew Shlomowitz.
MaerzMusik March 15-24; www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/aktuell/festivals/maerzmusik

australian voices series, anam

Also highlighting Australian composers is the Australian Voices series presented by Australian National Academy of Music. Each concert focuses on a particular composer and is curated by a guest artist starting off with works by Elena Kats-Chernin curated by pianist Timothy Young.
ANAM Australian Voices series; Elena Kats-Chernin, March 21; Raymond Hanson, April 23; Gordon Kerry, June 11, Wilfred Lehmann, Sept 5; New Beats, Oct 3; The Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, anam.com.au

the bell ringers ball, depot gallery

The Bell Ringer’s Ball is a neo-post-industrial exploration featuring the glorious bonging sound of gas-cylinders refashioned into playable art objects. In a collaborative venture by John Wright, Tim Hankinson, Nic Aplin and Steffan Ianigro visitors are encouraged to bang away at the installation. It will also serve as the environment for performances by Steffan Ianigro, the Splinter Orchestra and the Ampere guitar quartet (RT109).
The Bell Ringer’s Ball, Depot Gallery, 2 Danks St, exhibition March 15-25, performances: Steffan Ianigro March 15, Splinter Orchestra March 16, Ampere & Ianigro, March 23; http://www.thebellringersball.com

made in china, australia, mcclelland gallery

First exhibited at Salamanca Arts Centre, Made in China, Australia is now showing at the McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery in regional Victoria. Curated by Greg Leong it explores the Chinese Diaspora which Leong says “for many immigrant artists [constitutes] a site of hybridity” (press release). This is reflected in the inclusion of artists of different genders, generations and disciplines such as William Yang, Tony Ayres, Lindy Lee, Aaron Seeto, Jason Wing and Shuxia Chen.
Made in China, Australia, McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery, Langwarrin, VIC, (a Salamanca Arts Centre & CAST Touring exhibition), March 17 – June 9; http://www.mcclellandgallery.com

still in the loop

flesh & bone, kage
March 7-24, Fortyfivedownstairs, part of the 2013 L’Oreal Fashion Festival Cultural program;
www.kage.com.au
more…

forever now, adhocracy, vitalstatistix

Vitalstatistix is looking for 10 South Australian-based artists to participate in their Forever Now workshop. Successful applicants will work with project producers Willoh S Weiland, Jeff Khan, Brian Ritchie and Thea Baumann to prepare a catalogue of content that, in some form, will be launched into space—yep, sent to the stars.

Vitals are also seeking proposals for artists from across Australia to take part in their open-studio residency program Adhocracy. Artists develop work over the June long weekend in conversation with other artists and audiences.
Forever Now residency, deadline April 1; Adhocracy deadline April 12; http://vitalstatistixtheatrecompany.blogspot.com.au/

ISEA registrations

ISEA in Sydney is fast approaching. Along with a range of exhibitions, performances and public talks, the backbone of the event is the conference and early bird registrations are now open.
ISEA June 7-16, Conference June 11-13; Earlybird registrations close April 19; http://www.isea2013.org/events/conference/

gasworks circus showdown

For the circus freaks amongst us, Gasworks Theatre is running a circus and physical theatre competition and the prizes are not insubstantial. The winner receives a professional development package valued at $6,000 which includes rehearsal space, a publicity campaign, photography plus more. Runners up also get a good deal including an Adelaide Fringe Festival registration, marketing assistance and $500.
Deadline March 18; showdown May 15-18; www.gasworks.org.au.

nsw creative industries action plan

A taskforce, led by industry leaders, has been developing an Action Plan to promote growth, productivity and innovation in the Creative Industries in NSW. Comments and feedback now invited on the plan which is available online.
Deadline for comments, Tuesday April 2, before 9am
http://engage.haveyoursay.nsw.gov.au/iap-creativeindustries

still in the loop

upcoming australia council deadlines

OPPORTUNITIES TO ATTEND FREELY IMPROVISED MUSIC EVENTS ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN IN CANBERRA. HOWEVER THIS SITUATION HAS IMPROVED MORE RECENTLY THANKS TO THE EFFORTS OF A SMALL YET DEDICATED SCENE COMPRISING PERFORMERS, FANS AND VENUES AND TO WHICH THE ANNUAL SOUNDOUT FESTIVAL, ORGANISED BY RICHARD JOHNSON, MAKES A SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION.

For the past two years SoundOut has taken place in the intimate confines of Theatre 3 which offers a comfortable and stimulating environment with good acoustics. You can also sit in a leafy courtyard with a cold beer and interact with audience members and performers alike, which is the kind of thing that draws me to improvised music. It’s creative democracy in action; a free exchange of sounds, ideas and concepts unmoored from the trappings of past experience. The music on offer across the two days of the festival was mostly great and some of the highlights are offered here.

I had the loins stirred by the Brazilian Abaetetuba Collective which utilised percussion (Antonio Panda Gianfratti), double bass (Luiz Gubeissi), soprano sax (Thomas Rohrer) and the Japanese stringed instrument, the shamisen (Rodrigo Montoya). This group conjured free-form, crystallised tonalities that hit cacophonous peaks when things began to heat up.

It was great to see percussionist Tony Buck playing two Saturday sets, one with Magda Mayas, the other with Hermione Johnson, both pianists. Buck likes to decorate his kit with an assortment of objects which when struck, stroked or rubbed in the right way, produce shimmering washes of sound, metallic sparks or splintering polyrhythms. Buck is a master of his chosen instrument and in combination with two brilliant and highly energetic pianists—perhaps inspired by the wildly inventive Marilyn Crispell and Irene Schweizer—the results were multi-coloured starbursts, particularly when that whiskey kicked in.

Three performances in particular deserve mention for giving Canberra something unique. On the Saturday evening composer and violinist Jon Rose offered a loosely structured score for 27 performers where every instrument involved was given a starring role. I figured this was about as close as I was ever going to get to witnessing a full-blown group improvisation akin to the London Jazz Composers Orchestra. Composer/bassist Barry Guy has said about his 1989 piece Harmos for the LJCO that it was intended to expand “in all directions to encompass each player’s stylistic preferences…somehow the material implicitly embraces the musicians to a considerable degree without just constructing a line to blow on.” I’m guessing this was the intent of Jon Rose with his Composition for 27 artists.

Just before the piece commenced I noticed a score being handed to the performers. Rose gave some brief verbal instructions and then it began. The instruments involved were many but each was clearly defined as the piece built in intensity. More likely by intuition than design the sound seemed to take shape in a circular motion in which clusters of musicians would take the lead then pass the sound to those nearest them. The incredible thing about this semi-spontaneous composition was that the musicians involved had, in some cases, only just met their fellow performers and so were exploring a dynamic quite different from that of highly individualised technique and desire. In the end, the expanded harmonics fitted together like a puzzle and the music washed over the audience in great waves with smaller fragments darting from the stage. Indicative of a healthy creative approach to music-making, each performer worked to ensure the sounds ebbed, flowed and exploded according to feeling and loose structure. This piece comprised three parts universal consciousness and one part subtle conducting from Rose who guided a series of movements through to their logical conclusion. Combined with abstract visuals from filmmaker Louise Curham and cubist movements from Canberran dancer Alison Plevey, this performance was also magical to watch.

I had the pleasure of witnessing a performance on Sunday afternoon which featured Plevey in fluid, swinging motion that incorporated her clattering of stones as a sound source. Her supple movements provided a suitable momentum as stones were spread across the stage. With accompaniment from Reuben Ingalls on electronics, Luke Keanan-Brow on drums, Hermione Johnson on piano and Andrew Fedorovitch and Richard Johnson on sax and Annette Giesreigl on vocals, this made for a mesmerising and visceral set.

The same could be said of the raucous, roof-raising performance on Sunday afternoon featuring Jon Rose leading an ensemble made up of Rhys Butler on sax, Michael Norris on electronics, Adam Sussman on guitar, James Wapples on drums and Mike Majkowski on bass. At times the sound approached the ear-shattering levels of John Zorn’s earliest Naked City recordings and there was something very downtown New York about this intensely frenetic performance. This was a free-for-all in the true sense of the word.

Unlike the previous evening’s Composition for 27 Performers, Jon Rose melded into the performance rather than guiding it. The sonic collision within a small grouping was a welcome counterpoint to sparser moments across the weekend. It seemed that the louder and more intense the maelstrom became, the better it sounded, and when the crashing sheets of noise came to an abrupt halt I was going to quietly ask them to do it again.

EVER SINCE MODERN DANCE BUILT ITS MANIFESTO ON THE REJECTION OF REALISTIC STORYTELLING, CONTEMPORARY DANCE HAS BEEN A BIT OF A HARD SLOG FOR UNACCUSTOMED AUDIENCES. A DEEPLY ABSTRACT ART—AND NATALIE ABBOTT’S PHYSICAL FRACTALS IS RIGHT UP THERE WITH THE MOST ABSTRACT—CONTEMPORARY DANCE OFTEN HINGES ON A CAPACITY FOR SUGGESTIVENESS AND THE DESIRE TO CULTIVATE A RICH INTERIOR LIFE.

The tenuous ‘truth’ of a dance work is so often buried somewhere between movement and mood, that we all, I would say, need the ability to let our minds wander over the physical performance, if we are to get to its core.

Postmodernism has brought narrative, realism and politics back into dance, but not evenly so. In particular, there is a strand of Australian dance that has furiously resisted all figuration, remained staunchly formalist and—I mean this without reprimand—has privileged mood and atmosphere over concept and narrative. Physical Fractals, the first long-form work by young choreographer Natalie Abbott, sits squarely within this tradition. The work examines how a cross-interference of media stimuli—sound, light and movement—can create a meaningful audience experience. It is deeply formalist in intent, and I am somewhat glad I entered the auditorium without knowing this.

Two young female dancers, Abbott herself and Sarah Aitken, dressed in loose, comfortable black, perform repetitious sequences of simple gestures, gradually drawing intersecting lines within the circular stage. Their movements are uncomplicated but heavy, Haka-like—wide stomping backwards, dangling arms, weighted jumping, running, heavy falling of bodies—with strong, pendular shifts of weight. The choreography emphasises the weightiness of these two (quite lithe) bodies, and creates an effect of empathetic physical exhaustion in the audience, particularly as we watch Abbott and Aitken repeatedly crash to the ground, in the final sequence. Meanwhile, their thumps and stomps are looped, magnified and sent swirling back, building into a powerful echo, as if the two women are single-handedly raising a storm. At one point, the dancers swing microphones on their cords, building a symphony of static. The effect is hypnotic but deep: the heaviness of the performance lodges itself deeply in one’s body.

At its best, Physical Fractals makes us feel the sheer force of these simple movements on the dancers’ bodies. Abbott seems to emphasise weight not purely for sonic effect: repetition of falling, faltering and stooping builds a narrative of physical strain and resilience. It could be easily read as a feminist choreography, but equally as a humanist one (female body has limited significance here). Its dancing bodies are grounded, weighted, imperfectly synced, injurable, far from the superhero flying automata that one still sees. I was reminded acutely of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s early work, particularly Rosas Dans Rosas and Bartók, which wove the same strands of repetition, simple gestures and femininity into something formalist, yet humbly political and life affirming. (There was also an echo of her later work, which explores darkness, movement and silence within similar parameters.) But I kept waiting in vain for this work to use its magnificently realised means in the pursuit of some higher goal.

Physical Fractals continuously operated on the same plane, neither submerging us under its powerful storm into a meditative enlightenment, nor raising us to a bird’s eye realisation of higher purpose. I could not detect a fractal pattern (a fractal is self-similar, presenting the same complexity of build at different scales: think cauliflower or snowflake). I was waiting for a minimum of philosophical framework, something to gently give meaning to the genuine empathy the work was creating, something between awe and care; I was waiting for Abbott to utilise the powerful spell she had cast on us. It never came, and the work is weaker for its unfulfilled potential than it would have been had it ventured a smaller stake.

For the pure affective stamp it leaves, Physical Fractals is a formally successful work, and Abbott a sensitive and intelligent choreographer. Just as de Keersmaeker’s formalist work created political resonances she had not necessarily had in mind, so was I able to enjoy an interior dialogue about strength, resilience, mysticism and the fourth wave of feminism while hypnotised by this fine choreography. This is not, and cannot be wrong: the figurative emptiness at the heart of contemporary dance requires a suggestible viewer. I cannot escape the impression, however, that I enjoyed Physical Fractals for the wrong and unexpected reasons—against the grain of the author’s intent.

Dance Massive: Physical Fractals, choreographer, director, performer Natalie Abbott, collaborator Rebecca Jensen, performer Sarah Aitken, live sound design Daniel Arnot, dramaturg Matthew Day, lighting Govin Ruben; Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, March 12-16; http://dancemassive.com.au/

IN NATALIE ABBOTT AND REBECCA JENSEN’S PHYSICAL FRACTALS, TIME BECOMES ELASTIC, STRETCHING ITS LIMITS TO CREATE PHYSICALLY PALPABLE TENSION.

At these apex moments in the performance, movement is paused and, when resumed, time seems to snap back to familiar shape. The performance, shared with Sarah Aiken, messes with our personal sense of gravity and our concept of space. Much of the time we are hyper conscious of our own breath, which is often bated.

Physical Fractals begins with the dancers’ repeated movements bordering on the obsessive and becoming increasingly laboured. The unison of Abbott and Aiken’s movement is made even more impressive by their physical uniformity, down to the length of their hair, their similar height and build. The movements soon create a familiar pattern for the audience; we anticipate a backstroke into the centre from the corner of the performance space that will give way to a circular motion, heads bent and hair twirling. Despite the similarity of the dancers we pick up the tiniest variations in their actions; how one holds her arm out behind her slightly higher than the other for instance. Abbott appears to attack the choreography with more sanguinity, her face set in determination. Aiken’s performance presence is more serene, or resigned—she mirrors Abbott beautifully.

The dancing is accompanied by heavy silence which gives way to looped sounds picked up live from the stage. The dancers’ unison becomes intermittent. The space falls into darkness as the sounds crescendo and grow more insistent. Wave after turbulent sound wave crashes over us, rendering us breathless and uncomfortable. It’s a wild sound, like wind and water filling your head. The sound (Daniel Arnot) works in conjunction with clever lighting (Govin Ruben); both disorient our visual sense and lead to small sensory glitches. Later, Abbott and Aiken swing microphones on long cords through the air. Our proximity to the performers makes this a shared sensation, dangerous and hypnotic. Darkness falls over them while the rushing sound of the swinging microphones continues. When the stage is re-lit, the dancers are on the floor when we expect them to still be swinging the microphones. We had sat knotted up and tense, trying to gauge something in the dark while imagining the microphones slipping out of control.

The success of the performance relies on tension and release—the pendulum swings from the dancers being the focus to the audience’s reaction taking centre stage. The next chapter of the dance is characterised by trotting feet, a kind of dance/march that eventually becomes plodding. The continued unison here made me think of Lipizzaner stallions—perhaps because the performers were now subserviently on all fours. The dance becomes more gruelling when the pair repeatedly collide with the floor, first backwards then straight back up and crumpling forward. The backfall is broken by one hand.

The audience watches on, unsettled and contemplative, again the focus on us—on our watching. The sensitive microphones around the space make us reluctant to move; I spot a woman guiltily swig from a beer bottle as the dancers fall again and again. Physical Fractals is an acutely rendered study in the boundaries between audience and performers. Here these boundaries are traversed through short-winded sensory experiences and in our emotional investment in the work.

LOCATED IN THE AUSTRALIAN NORTH-WEST, BROOME HAS AN ABUNDANT HISTORY OF MANY PEOPLES COMING TO LIVE TOGETHER. IT WAS EXEMPTED FROM THE WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY BECAUSE IT WAS THE HUB OF AUSTRALIA’S PEARLING INDUSTRY. AS A RESULT, MANY CHILDREN LIKE DALISA PIGRAM HAVE GROWN UP PROUD OF THEIR MIXED, CULTURAL HERITAGE.

This is reflected in Pigram’s physical training: a bricolage of Malaysian martial arts, gymnastics, indigenous culture and refined, animal movements. It is also part of who she is. Not that such a medley of origins has always been welcome. Gudirr Gudirr opens with a 1928 report to AO Neville (Commissioner for Native Affairs) on the dubious status of peoples of mixed heritage in the Broome area.

All the while, Pigram stands in a far corner, her back towards us. She moves nearer, still facing upstage, punching, lunging, and rotating along the axis of her spine. She cuts a strong diagonal, iterating a movement lexicon in a ritual crossing of space. Facing us, she opens her body into a low lunge to the side, Krishna holding a spear. Or is it a harpoon?

The screen at the back of the space flashes black and white images throughout: of family, living ancestors, gurus and masters. There is an older man, circulating chi, nursing it between his hands. His mastery presides over this performance. Pigram is dedicated to her moving, clear and bold. Her feet say a lot. They are broad, grounded, the feet of a woman who has walked, and fished. She tells a story of catching crabs with her father, learning the ethos of the fisherman: catch enough to eat, no more. The little girl learns to work the long net suspended from the ceiling.

House lights brighten, we look at each other. Pigram is an airline steward demonstrating the pros and cons of net throwing, inducting us into fishing culture via the technology of the throw net. Perched along its grid-like netting, she looks like an island girl, agile, flexible, at one with its flowing lines.

As the music turns sour, dystopia enters this coastal idyll. The documentary flavour of black and white imagery gives way to the elicitations of colour. A goanna stumbles, its head trapped inside a beer can. History enters the life of the animal. Pigram snatches a microphone, declaring what is past and what is present. If the old days are over, their legacy is not. It is time, she says, to decolonise blackfella’s minds, echoing French Algerian Frantz Fanon’s heartfelt cry, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

Pigram occupies the liminal space between colonisation and cultural freedom. Her movements are jerky, discombobulated. They do not eat space, they are confined by it. A tryptich shows young men fighting each other in the dirt, their misdirected aggression devouring their own future. Three images blend into a single scream. Pigram verbalises the anger in a tirade of “fucken” this, “fucken” that. A proliferation of fuckens fills the screen. It becomes surreal. Pigram’s body heaves catching its breath.

What happens next is key. This is Dalisa Pigram’s moment, as an artist and as a subject of history. She is poised in the present of all that has become. She leans out, supported by the long net, her feet on the ground. Leaning: neither fully supporting her own weight nor surrendering it to the net, Pigram explores the possibilities that lie between her body and the net. She runs, veering in a circle, testing the pull of the net as it meets the force of her own activity. The net circles as she soars towards the audience. Time stretches to the elastic sounds of jazz. This expression of the dancer’s agency is a mixture of freedom and constraint. She is a compact set of forces, aware of her location, her lineage, but finding a creative line of flight. Three snakes, one snake three ways, slither over river stones, elegant, inexorable. Pigram dances her own future, stretching the space of possibility not just for herself but for us too.

Artist Sarah-Jane Norman shows us around her installation and discusses the performances that make up Unsettling Suite which explores her Indigenous and English heritage. Part of Matters of Life and Death at Performance Space, Sydney, showing Feb 22-March 10, 2013.

realblak
blood is such clever stuff
sarah-jane norman: performance-making
RealTime issue #111 Oct-Nov 2012 p3

inbetween time 2010
oblique ethnicities
osunwunmi: zoran todorovic, sarah jane norman
RealTime issue #101 Feb-March 2011 p24

the quick and the dirty
david williams on mardi gras at performance space
Sarah-Jane Norman’s Songs of Rapture and Torture (#1: Surabaya Johnny)
RealTime issue #84 April-May 2008 p39

BACK IN 2001, TASMANIA WAS A QUIET STATE. IT HAD FINE FOOD AND WINE, BREATHTAKING NATURAL WONDERS AND SOME KEY CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS, BUT IT WASN’T REALLY KNOWN FOR FESTIVITIES (GIVE OR TAKE A FEW POPPING CORKS AT THE END OF THE SYDNEY TO HOBART).

So the Premier Jim Bacon decided they needed a festival. He put the irrepressible Robyn Archer in charge (now heading up the Canberra Centenary see realtime tv interview) and Ten Days on the Island was born, a biennial festival servicing the state with exciting cultural wonders from islands large and small around the world, as well as profiling local talent.

the duffy touch

The festival is now in its seventh incarnation, passing through the founding stage with Archer, through to consolidation with Elizabeth Walsh, and now in the firm but gentle hands of Jo Duffy, previously director or the Darwin Festival. While Duffy, a long-time fan of the festival, had no desire to make sweeping changes, she has made a few shifts to the structure that she hopes will enhance the festival experience.

By 2011, the festival was taking place in around 64 locations throughout the state. Duffy has decided to concentrate the activities to 10 key locations. Rather than a one off fling, each town gets a comprehensive festival experience with a selection of shows over consecutive days, a supper club for before- and after-show communing and a series of public programs including workshops and artists talks.

Duffy says: “What I felt I could bring to Ten Days on the Island was to further develop the festival atmosphere so it has the potential to take over [each] town; to build up the momentum and the enthusiasm of people to go and see things they wouldn’t normally go and see. To encourage people to go to a bar after a show and talk about what they’ve seen and have the opportunity to meet some of the artists.”

The challenge with this format is choosing shows that will work across multiple locations. Duffy says: “The curatorial process started with getting to know people all around Tasmania—getting a general sense of who they are, whether they already engage in the arts, and if they don’t, why they don’t. The Tasmanian population is quite evenly spread right across state… [The towns are] so close together here, six or seven minutes apart, so they have a mixture of people. You have a number of seniors, some early retirees, you’ll get a group of professionals, young families, people who work in the timber industry, people who work in the Antarctica division, scientists… everybody is kind of all in together. So that gives a certain amount of freedom. There’s probably nothing in the program, with the exception of logistics of size, that I wouldn’t put in one town because of its content.”

That said, there are a few shows that are being tailored to their locations. CuriousWorks’ The Other Journey was previously devised in Parramatta reflecting the stories of a range of migrants from Sri Lanka (see RT106). The company is adapting the work to include stories that reflect the experiences of Sri Lankan people in the Glenorchy region.

Also UK aerial company Ockham’s Razor will perform a full show at the Theatre Royal in Hobart, but then adapt a section of their work to be performed in the rafters of the old train station in Queenstown. Duffy explains: “One of the reasons we’re taking Ockham’s Razor to Queenstown is that about 100 kids in the area have been involved in circus workshops over the last 18 months with Slipstream, a Tasmanian circus company. They have an interest in that kind of work already so for us to be able to take the company over there shows the kids not only the best in the world, but also that these people are making a career out doing what they’ve been learning in the workshops.”

exchange and legacy

This potential for connection and exchange is a vital part of Duffy’s vision and has been formalised into a huge program called Beyond Ten Days. It offers a plethora of activities from artist talks, master classes and workshops to professional secondments for young people interested in developing a career in the arts. Duffy says “There’s quite a lot of industry interaction, and that goes both ways. In some cases the visiting artists are learning something from Tasmanian artists and in other cases it’s the other way round… [We’re] even helping people who work in the arts to get to know the facilities that are available here now for audiences and other artists with special needs—things like captioning services, live interpretations of shows, touch tours before performances.”

This idea of the festival creating lasting legacies within the Tasmanian culture has always been a key item on the festival agenda. Over the last 12 years the festival has gone into small towns working with local groups and councils to enhance not just cultural understanding but also the physical infrastructure, installing three-phase power in local town halls and creating accessible, professional venues that are now part of a much wider touring circuit. Duffy says, “There are other arts companies in Tasmania like Tasperforms, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Tasdance and the Tasmanian Theatre Company who now tour a lot more to really small locations because those venues are established and they’re able to use them.”

the program

Scanning Duffy’s first program it looks like a well-balanced, healthy yet tasty banquet with a little something for everyone, which Duffy sees as vital for festivals that can’t rely purely on a capital city audience.

The international centrepiece is by US company Elevator Repair Service, who appeared in Sydney in 2009 with their courageous seven-hour reading of the Great Gatsby (RT91). Here they take on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which roams from the US to the ennui-tinged cafes of Paris to the passion-soaked streets of Spain in the 1920s. While still epic it’s an excerpted adaptation thus its title, The Select.

Equally grand in vision is the collaboration between Terrapin Puppet Theatre and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Shadow Dreams, which sees the performance taking place simultaneously in two locations (Hobart and Launceston, then Hobart and Burnie), linked by the early manifestations of the National Broadband Network. Written by Finnegan Kruckemeyer, it tells the story of two young boys who awake one morning having dreamt each other’s dream.

Local talent is also being nurtured in dance with Finding Centre, the choreographic debut of Trisha Dunn a former Tasdance company member. She will be exploring the physical and psychological idea of finding balance in contemporary life, in collaboration with visual and video artists Jason Lam and Adam Synnott. Tasperforms will present locals—playwright Tom Holloway and actor Robert Jarman who have teamed up to create As We Forgive: Three Morality Tales for an Amoral Age, a solo performance, accompanied by cello exploring solitude, grace and revenge. Tasdance will also be touring Luminous Flux, a double-bill featuring a work choreographed by Tanja Liedkte in 2004 and Melbourne’s Byron Perry. And there’s also a show by local art academic turned comedienne, Hanna Gadsby.

There are performances by Dublin’s HotForTheatre, Brisbane’s Circa, two shows by Sydney’s Erth Physical and Visual Theatre, music form Corsica and Cape Breton (Canada), a screen-dance installation by Sue Healey as well as a comprehensive visual arts and literature program.

the state of festivals

Since the first Ten Days on the Island, the Tasmanian cultural landscape has changed dramatically. Riding the wake of Ten Days, there are now multiple major festivities across the year. Most recently on the scene is MONA FOMA which will also be instituting a winter festival in 2013 titled Dark MOFO (RT89, RT96 and RT108). Also making waves are the live art activities of Junction Arts in Launceston (see RT110, and RT99).

So is there room in this small state for all this art? Jo Duffy believes there is: “Everybody works closely down here, there’s a very strong collegiality within the arts industry. And the main proof is in the pudding—people are attending all of the events and the levels are fantastic. So the audiences are coming. There’s certainly room for everyone.”

Ten Days on the Island, Hobart, Launceston, Burnie, Huonville, Campbell Town, Swansea, Deloraine, St Helens, Queenstown, Devonport & Latrobe, plus single events at Flinders Island, King Island and Port Arthur, March 15-24; http://www.tendaysontheisland.com

Time to plan your next masterwork. A range of festivals are calling for innovative, underground, alternative work at various stages of development. There are also residencies in Sydney and Montreal, an invitation to Estonia and a very lucrative writing gig for the right literary geek at the Cube QUT.

underbelly arts lab & festival

Underbelly—the festival not the TV epic—will be returning to Cockatoo Island in July under new artistic director Eliza Sarlos (RT105). With an emphasis on process, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, site-specifity and audience engagement, Underbelly is now calling artists to take part in the two-week lab and festival.
Applications close March 18; http://underbellyarts.com.au/2013/call-out-for-artists/

situate art in festivals

Taking over where the Splendid Arts Lab left off (RT105 & RT94), Salamanca Arts Centre will be running a three-year program (2013-15) for early career artists to create experimental works for festival environments. Key partners include MONA FOMA, Dark MOFO, Darwin Festival, Harvest Music and Arts, Fringe World, WOMADelaide, and Vryfees in South Africa.
Applications open March 25, closing April 8; www.situate.org.au

dimanche rouge festival, tallinn, estonia

Last year Paris-based organisation Dimanche Rouge presented a global streaming event connecting Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Paris (RT111 online). Now they are inviting Australian artists to physically join them at their annual festival held in Tallinn, Estonia in October 2013. The scope for creativity is vast including live art, dance, music, hairdressing and tattooing.
Applications close May 1; www.dimancherouge.org/dimanche-rouge-estonia

sydney fringe

Reinvented four years ago, Sydney Fringe has rapidly claimed the crown of largest independent arts festival in NSW. Sydney Fringe will take place September 7-24 and is now calling for proposals for works in categories including theatre, music, dance, gaming, graphic novels, manga and more.
Registrations close May 10; more info http://2013.sydneyfringe.com

artspace montreal & sydney residencies

Artspace are now calling for applications from NSW-based visual artists for a residency at the impressive Darling Foundry arts complex in Montreal Canada, Oct-Dec 2013. The residency is fully funded, supported by Arts NSW and the Canada Council.
Applications due April 19; www.artspace.org.au/residency_international.php

If Montreal seems a bit too far away, Artspace (with Regional Arts NSW and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund) is also offering a three-month fully funded residency at their Sydney studios for a regional NSW-based artist.
Applications close Friday 3 May 3, 2013; www.artspace.org.au/about_news.php?i=20130225189240

the cube, qut digital writing residency

The recently opened Cube at QUT is an ambitious digital interactive learning and display space designed to highlight developments and projects involving Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). The Cube has just announced a Digital Writing Residency for an individual or team to create a literary-inspired project that can involve “digital writing, communication, narrative and interaction, programming and digital story telling” (press release). The residency includes in-kind support, facilities and a budget of $35,000.
Applications close April 3; www.thecube.qut.edu.au/about/residency.php

upcoming australia council deadlines

Bio

I’ve just left my job of 22 years, where I lectured in philosophy at La Trobe University. While I’ve always done other things, especially dance, it’s still a big deal for me to leave the institution. One idea behind my leaving is to make space for “other things.”

So, what happened next? I began this year in exactly the same way as last year: I had the same writing obligations, a book chapter for an edited collection, two art pieces, all the while waiting to return to my book. Ironically, finishing my book is one of the main reasons I have left (academic, paid) work. I am more or less halfway through. It is momentous. It ties together my interest in the body, dance and movement, with the stimulation and elaboration of conceptual thinking. Hopefully, I won’t end up like Albert Camus’ character, Joseph Grand, forever writing and rewriting the first sentence of his novel. Apart from that, life goes on, supremely busy but in a nice way. I feel I have a wider horizon of possibility now that I am not locked into a job. Meantime, I return to the body, my body, moving, dancing, rolling, stretching, this way and that. Dancing is one of my great loves.

Exposé

It was nice when, 15-odd years ago, I began to write for RealTime. No footnotes, less protocols, the writing itself was fun. Academic writing is one thing, and I love it. It is especially suited to philosophy, which is a very specific technique. But the flow of writing about art for a different kind of audience is pleasurable for its sheer freedom of form. Not that there aren’t certain constraints, such as obligations towards the artist and the work.

Writing makes you think. It thinks for you. That’s why I’m writing this big book. I have already laid out its philosophical landscape but the detail and depth only comes through the writing. It is emergent. I pursue lines of thought which are not yet formed. I fiddle with them. I read, present and play with concepts and the formation of ideas. These ideas are themselves part of a social and cultural milieu, which poses and provokes problems for thought. In my writing, I move between domains of thought, practice and flashes of insight embedded in movement. After reading a short piece on habit, I will dive back into this interconnected morass of thought.

Selected articles

tweaking reality
philipa rothfield: this monster body and one show only
RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 p34

between one and the many
philipa rothfield: ros warby, tower suites
RealTime issue #108 April-May 2012 p24

dancing across waves
philipa rothfield experiences contamination and distance at next wave
RealTime issue #26 Aug-Sept 1998 p8

Bio

I studied International Relations before taking a sabbatical in Palestine and then Arctic Russia. As I was drifting through 32 euro-a-night hotels in the red-light district of Paris and other places of disrepute, I realised that the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations in Canberra was no place for the likes of me. I turned my hand to writing instead.

I was given a push by Sian Prior to pursue arts journalism while studying Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT. Initially covering fashion events, I became associate editor of a travel and arts magazine, a regular contributor to RealTime and a freelance writer/editor. My poems have since gone on to make it to print and won a few prizes. I live in Melbourne with my partner, ceramic artist and sculptor, Andrei Davidoff and my daughter Augustine.

Exposé

I think Australia separates art from life either by putting it on a pedestal or shrugging it off for its perceived elitism. Art’s rightful place is at the centre of our cultural life as a part of the fabric of every waking day. Its role is to rouse us from the commonplace and quotidian. I write about art to steal my way into the middle of it as the eager audience, and to share maybe one moment, or crystallise some thought that resonates with a reader and piques their curiosity.

Dance and performance are completely visceral and subjective in their stories. In a way, it is on par with poetry. Movement becomes poetry; a language devoid of words and it has the power to trigger memories or new connections.

English was the second language I spoke. My parents were Russian/Soviet refugees. Like Kerouac or Nabokov, finding a voice amid the languages has been a major influence in why and how I write.

Selected articles

highly strung dance
varia karipoff: gareth hart, ellipsis
RealTime issue #112 Dec-Jan 2012 p27

dancing fish tales
varia karipoff: james welsby, tidefolk fictions
RealTime issue #110 Aug-Sept 2012 p33

live art release
varia karipoff: an appointment with j dark
RealTime issue #109 June-July 2012 p28

pain makes art
varia karipoff: georgie read, brigid jackson, la mama
RealTime issue #103 June-July 2011 p37

flesh & bone, kage

This March Melbourne is all about dance (Dance Massive) and fashion (the L’Oreal Fashion Festival) and KAGE’s latest work Flesh & Bone combines the two. Company directors Kate Denborough and Gerard Van Dyck perform the work (onstage together for the first time in eight years) and have collaborated with fashion designer Lisa Gorman of the sleek, chic Gorman label. The work explores “the contemporary realities of gender roles in today’s society” looking at the primal forces of desire and attraction (press release).
Flesh & Bone, KAGE, March 7-24, Fortyfivedownstairs, part of the 2013 L’Oreal Fashion Festival Cultural program; www.kage.com.au/

jaap blonk, australian tour

Kurt Schwitter’s epic Ursonate is arguably the apotheosis of sound poetry, and Dutch musician and vocalist Jaap Blonk knows it off-by-heart, performing it since the early 1980s (listen here http://www.ubu.com/sound/blonk_ursonate86.html). Blonk presents his and others’ sound poetry, as well as his intense and often humorous vocal/electronic improvisations around Australia in March.
Jaap Blonk tour: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Wollongong; for dates &venues see http://www.jaapblonk.com/Pages/ontour.html

artmonth, sydney

ArtMonth is already in full swing incorporating over 300 exhibitions in galleries across Sydney. This years’ directors, Penelope Benton and Alexandra Clapham, have also assembled a particularly feisty looking talks program exploring feminism, Indigenous issues, collaboration, collecting. There are also workshops including an all-in nude life drawing classes (yep everyone gets nekid!) or a public dance class led by the idiosyncratic David Capra (see RT112).
ArtMonth, various venues Sydney, March 1-24; www.artmonthsydney.com.au/

inaudible visions, oscillating silences, isabelle delmotte

For those in the Northern Rivers region, multimedia artist Isabelle Delmotte has crafted an intriguing exhibition that draws on the skills of leading cinema sound designers, a script writer and storyboard artist to explore the conscious and unconscious effect of the sound track both within the cinema context and in the outside world.
Inaudible Visions, Oscillating Silences, Isabelle Delmotte with Damian Candusso, Carlos Choconta, Tom Heuzenroeder, John Kassab, Markus Kellow, Evan Kitchener, Ben Vlad and Michael Worthington, Roger Monk and Ben Leon, Northern Rivers Community Gallery, Ballina, March 6-28; http://www.inaudible-visions.net/

wow film festival, wift & seen & heard, red rattler

A lot has changed in terms of gender equality over the last 50 years, but the balance of prominent female filmmakers to male is still way out of whack. This is something the World of Women’s Cinema (WOW), run by Women in Film & Television (WIFT), has long worked to remedy. The 19th WOW festival is now upon us with screenings and panel discussions exploring the world and cinema ‘through the eyes of women.’
WOW, March 5-15, various venues, Sydney; www.wift.org/wow/

Also celebrating women in film is the Sydney-based, Seen & Heard, a series of screenings over three weeks promoting the message “that films made by women are not just for women, but are films that should be seen by everyone.”
Seen & Heard, Red Rattler, Marrickville, March 7, 14, 21;http://seenandheardfilms.com/2013-festival/

le_temps: explorations in phenology, dab lab, uts

Drawing on the vast image libraries of the Royal Botanic Gardens herbarium, Climate Watch’s crowd sourced database, and Flickr, Le_temps: explorations in phenology consists of large-scale projections exploring the life cycle and seasonality of plants. Media artist and environmentalist Tega Brain hopes that the show will help us “come to terms with the idea that humans, and what we like to call ‘the environment,’ are actually inseparable” (website). Brain has collaborated with image database farmer Brad Miller (RT94) and programmer Adam Hinshaw on this intriguing project.
DAB LAB Research Gallery, UTS, March 6-29 http://cfsites1.uts.edu.au/dab/news-events/news-detail.cfm?ItemId=33821

remotespace

Remotespace is an online exhibition platform presenting only two exhibitions a year, each six months long. In this fast-paced, multi-tasking world this seems like eons of net-time and presents a refreshingly singular focus. At the end of the exhibition, the content is taken down from the site and reworked into a real world hardcopy artist book. Currently exhibiting is The Telepathy Project (see RT86 http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue86/9089) exploring the artists’ adventures in Dream Telepathy while on a residency in Spain.
See the current exhibition at www.remotespace.org/

imagining the capital & cinema’s golden slumber, national film and sound archive

Canberra is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, throwing a year-long party with an astonishing range of events. This weekend the National Film and Sound Archive will be holding a special outdoor screening—a compilation of restored film and audio excerpts showing 100 years of lifestyle, politics and architecture, accompanied by live music. You can also catch the tail end of Cinema’s Golden Summer, a festival featuring silent films made between 1910-1913, also with live music.
Imagining the Capital: Canberra on Film, Senate Rose Gardens, King George Terrace, Sunday March 10; www.nfsa.gov.au/whats-on/canberra-centenary/imagining-the-capital/; Cinema’s Golden Summer, Arc Cinema & NFSA Courtyard, till March 9; www.nfsa.gov.au/calendar/?type=cinemas-golden-summer

old tote celebrations, nida

In 1963 the Old Tote was established in a tin shed on the UNSW campus which rapidly became a hotbed for Australian playwriting and acting talent nurturing the likes of John Bell, Robyn Nevin, Jacki Weaver, David Williamson and Richard Wherrett. Fifty years on and NIDA is celebrating the legacy of this formative company with an exhibition of archival material and an opening day of panels and play readings featuring leading Sydney theatre artists.
NIDA, exhibition March 9-28, opening celebrations March 9; www.nida.edu.au/whats-on

congratulations

The Tanja Liedtke Foundation has announced the recipient of the third Tanja Liedtke Fellowship. Dubbo-born, WAPPA graduate Joseph Simons will spend time in Berlin developing a project, attending ImpulsTanz and participating in the International Summer Lab presented and facilitated by Tanzlabor_21.
www.tanja-liedtke-foundation.org/

Tasdance has decided upon the three recipients for their inaugural Tasdance Residency for Independent Practice (TRIP). Dance Makers Collective (NSW), Jason Pitt (NSW) and Danielle Micich (WA) will each undertake an intensive three-week development period at the Tasdance Studio and Cottage.
http://tasdance.com.au/explore/

The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarships have increased their prize pool in 2013 in order to award more young artists aged 18-35 with a $20,000 scholarship for travel and professional development. Categories alternate over two years and in 2013 the recipients are: for acting, Johnny Carr, Kate Sherman and Matilda Ridgway; painting, Gabriella Hirst, Nathan Hawkes and Tully Moore; sculpture, Kate Scardifield, Christopher Hanrahan and Patrick Foster; and singing, Bryony Dwyer and Lauren Eastman. The 2014 Bequest will focus on architecture, ballet, instrumental music, poetry and prose.
www.martenbequest.com.au/

Find

March 2013

installed

sensed

hybridised

futured

questioned

nostalgia for the signified

haunted weather

big, bigger, biggest

dancing dialogues

festival compression

i should have drunk more champagne, the basement, metro arts

onside & 6 women dance, casula powerhouse

group show, mka: theatre of new writing & darebin arts’ speakeasy

waterwheel world water day symposium

grant stevens, artmonth, agnsw

drawn from sound, spectrum gallery

melbourne queer film festival

message sticks

maerzmusik, berlin

australian voices series, anam

the bell ringers ball, depot gallery

made in china, australia, mcclelland gallery

still in the loop

forever now, adhocracy, vitalstatistix

ISEA registrations

gasworks circus showdown

nsw creative industries action plan

still in the loop

upcoming australia council deadlines

related articles

the duffy touch

exchange and legacy

the program

the state of festivals

underbelly arts lab & festival

situate art in festivals

dimanche rouge festival, tallinn, estonia

sydney fringe

artspace montreal & sydney residencies

the cube, qut digital writing residency

upcoming australia council deadlines

Bio

Exposé

Selected articles

Bio

Exposé

Selected articles

flesh & bone, kage

jaap blonk, australian tour

artmonth, sydney

inaudible visions, oscillating silences, isabelle delmotte

wow film festival, wift & seen & heard, red rattler

le_temps: explorations in phenology, dab lab, uts

remotespace

imagining the capital & cinema’s golden slumber, national film and sound archive

old tote celebrations, nida

congratulations

realtime