What goes through your mind and what happens to your body as a performance unfolds before and inside you? Engagement, contemplation, revelation, adrenalin hit, thump of the heart, tear in the eye, sweat on the brow, blow to the stomach? Bewilderment, irritation, the squirm in the seat, panic, the desire to flee? We mostly speak of performance in analytical and emotional terms, sometimes as physical response but also, importantly, as perceptual—a shift in point of view, displacement, disorientation, an adjustment to the senses.

In this e-dition, Nikki Heywood and Rennie McDougall, both writers and performers, find their states of being altered by idiosyncratic dance works. McDougall’s patience is tested as he struggles to engage with a performance by NY dancer Heather Kravas, acknowledging the challenge to reviewing that the work presents and the complexity with which its theme, “Women are not objects,” is realised. Heywood watches naked Australian dancers working with French choreographer Xavier Le Roy become animals and plants, their gaze implicating and reorienting the audience. Digital art, with VR now back in the picture, can reconfigure our perceptions, but so can dancers performing in unadorned spaces.

Keith & Virginia