Category Archives: 2013

Review: Daniel Schlusser Ensemble: M+M (way overdue)

While nominally based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Daniel Schlusser’s M+M does not attempt to represent the text: a perhaps wise decision given that the novel is arguably – more than 500 theatrical versions later – fundamentally unstageable.

Unwieldy and expansive in both size and scope, Master and Margarita weaves three narratives wildly disparate in theme and tone: a hilarious grotesque in which the Devil with his entourage (including the vodka-swilling cat Behemoth) wreaks havoc on the 1930s Moscow; the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, seen from the perspective of Pontius Pilate, troubled both by his conscience and a raging headache; and the story of Margarita, who makes a pact with the Devil to save her lover, the imprisoned author of a novel about Christ in the anti-religious Soviet Union.

It is a perplexing work and has been read as an hommage to Goethe’s Faust, a denunciation of the human condition under Communism, a Menippean satire on Moscow’s literary circles, a Tolstoyan exploration of Christian ethics, an absurdist grotesque in the vein of Gogol and Kharms, and an occult fantasy, richly informed by Freemason and medieval symbology.

Any familiarity with the novel, however, may be a hindrance more than an aid: M+M uses Bulgakov’s life and work merely as the starting point for an original theatrical exploration. Those searching for familiar characters and plot points may fail to grasp the peculiar beauty of this production.

This review was published in Guardian Australia on 14 October 2013. Read the whole review here.

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RW: Hofesh Shechter: Sun (way overdue)

Shechter’s choreographies are distinctly masculine: angry and political, they are socially and emotionally situated in the contemporary world. With hard and heavy bodies and momentous shifts of weight, they carry echoes of Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva – the company for which he formerly danced – but are more overtly narrative and theatrical. Also a percussionist, Shechter’s self-composed scores strongly shape these pieces with their relentless rhythmic pulse and propulsion.

Australian audiences have been able to follow Shechter’s work closely – while the choreographer is based in the UK, he has made frequent visits to Australian festivals, from early short works Uprising and In Your Rooms, to his 2011 work Political Mother. That show suggested Shechter was still struggling with the transition to long form, and that issue remains apparent in Sun.

This review was published in Guardian Australia on 13 October 2013. Read the whole review here.

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Dance Massive 05: More or Less Monstrous (reviewed: Atlanta Eke’s Monster Body)

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Atlanta Eke, Monster Body
photo Rachel Roberts

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.

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Atlanta Eke, Monster Body
photo Rachel Roberts

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 accustomed to seeing rubber animal faces more 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 civilization. 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.

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Monster Body, Atlanta Eke
photo Rachel Roberts

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 only made 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 Gifted and Talented), 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 show 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

First published in RealTime, Dance Massive special edition, Mar 2013. All rights reserved.

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Dance Massive 03: The Body Un-Mirrored (reviewed: Chunky Move’s 247 Days)

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Lauren Langlois, 247 days, Chunky Move
photo Jeff Busby

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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; http://dancemassive.com.au

First published in RealTime, Dance Massive special edition, Mar 2013. All rights reserved.

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Dance Massive 02: inside the audience (reviewed: Lee Serle’s P.O.V.)

P.O.V. presented by Arts House & Lee Serle
Kristy Ayre, P.O.V, Lee Serle
photo Ponch Hawkes

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.

P.O.V. presented by Arts House & Lee Serle
James Andrews, P.O.V, Lee Serle
photo Ponch Hawkes

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.

P.O.V. presented by Arts House & Lee Serle
Lee Serle, Lily Paskas, P.O.V
photo Ponch Hawkes

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.

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; http://dancemassive.com.au/

First published in RealTime, Dance Massive special edition, Mar 2013. All rights reserved.

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Dance Massive 04: The Creation of an Affective Community (reviewed: Matthew Day’s Intermission)

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Matthew Day, Intermission
photo Rachel Roberts

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 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 (rather, moving) 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.

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Matthew Day, Intermission
image James Brown

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, 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

First published in RealTime, Dance Massive special edition, Mar 2013. All rights reserved.

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Dance Massive 01: suggestive formalism (reviewed: Natalie Abbott’s Physical Fractals)

PHYSICAL FRACTALS presented by Arts House & Natalie Abbott
Natalie Abbott, Sarah Aitken, Physical Fractals
photo Ponch Hawkes

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.

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Sarah Aitken, Natalie Abbott, Physical Fractals
photo Ponch Hawkes

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 to 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 towards 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/

First published in RealTime, Dance Massive special edition, Mar 2013. All rights reserved.

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