As is the case most years when I come to the end of Melbourne's arts festival season, I feel pretty flat. Too many shows, too many hours travelling and sitting in darkened spaces, too many late nights.
And to top it off, I didn't see one dance show which really excited me. Whether this is a reflection on the art or or on me as an audience member is hard to say.
You can read my hasty reflections on The Age website, and the (perhaps less hastily scrawled) views of my esteemed colleague Dr Jordan Beth Vincent.
Here are the links :
Tom Tom Crew: Urban beats and acrobatics, performed by a bunch of hot Aussie blokes.
Balletlab presented the world premiere of Aviary: Adorned with amazing costumes, this three act piece ranges from naturalistic mating rituals to nightclub scenes and brilliant, postmodern ballet.
We Came From the East: By Papuan choreographer Jecko Siompo, hip hop meets traditional dance, Indo-style.
Byron Perry's first full length piece Double Think: A duo of split-second timing for Lee Serle, Kirstie McCracken, some ingenious boxes and lighting.
Assembly: Gideon Obarzanek's last creation as Artistic Director of Chunky Move: made with the help of 60 young Victorian Opera singers and eight dancers, it looked at the choreography of crowds and the loneliness within them.
Hofesh Schechter returned to Melbourne with Political Mother: an onslaught of live guitars and drums, screaming vocals and gut wrenching action.
And finally, my less than effusive wrap of the festival from a dance perspective.
Presented at Art Play, Melbourne
October 13 -16, 2011
Created by Sally Chance
As we enter the warm, light filled space at ArtPlay, surrounded by mums and babies seated on soft pastel rugs, a sense of community is instantly established. Gentle music plays in the background, people smile and murmur. It’s a good place to be, the energy is positive and gentle.
And when Heather Frahn begins to sing, simple syllables and baby-like vocalisations in a lilting melody, it becomes clear that this experience will be about more than just warmth and light and comfort, it will also be very beautiful.
Created by Adelaide-based artist Sally Chance, This [Baby] Life is a half-hour of gently immersive, quietly playful art for babies aged four months to eighteen months. The babies are free to crawl and totter around the space, or remain closely snuggled with their carer. Adventurous little ones may find themselves playing peekaboo with a friendly adult, or having a blanket swirled through the air above their heads.
There’s nothing sudden or frightening or boisterous here, just gorgeous music and pleasant dance, performed by a trio of friendly grown-ups.
Dancers Tuula Roppola and Stephen Noonan crawl about the space, making eye contact with their young audience and mirroring the babies’ actions. Some children find it quite fascinating, to have a big person nearby who moves just like themselves. The crawling action flows into a floor-based movement sequence, set to Frahn’s wonderful instrumental sounds.
Mandola, melodic steel drums and a caxixi shaker combined with amplified voice allow for a variety of sounds and tonal colours, while keeping the music simple and soothing. The familiar melody of Row Row Row Your Boat is used several times, cocooning the young audience in familiarity while also coaxing them into a new environment. At an energetic moment, egg-shaped rattles are offered to the little people so that they can join in the bouncy music making.
As the final sleepy notes subside, there’s no rush to leave the room. That gentle energy remains, as do the performers and the instruments, allowing time for play and conversation and thanks giving for such a thoughtfully devised, nurturing experience.
Shian Law & Naryana Takacs
Performed at Arts House, Meat Market, as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival
1 Oct, 2011
JORDAN BETH VINCENT, Reviewer
Three dancers (choreographer Shian Law, Melissa Jones, Peter AB Wilson) wander into the performance space. They strike one nonchalant pose after another, seemingly vague and uninterested by their own actions. This sense of disengagement remains as the stillness gives way to sharp angular movements that emphasise a sense of structure and shape.
With Narayana Takacs’ shifting geometric light projection and John Nguyen’s wall of pulsing sound, this work would do well as a gallery art installation. This impression is confirmed at the end when the dancers disappear offstage, leaving only swirling digital shapes and the pound of electronic music.
Proximate Edifice is one of those works that is simultaneously mesmerising yet strangely uninteresting, never quite leaping from conceptual genesis to fully formed work. However, it does have potential for further choreographic development. Works like this, after all, are what the Fringe is all about.
Video Link: http://vimeo.com/30840749
Concept / Visual Media - Narayana Takacs
Choreographer / Performer - Shian Law
Performer - Melissa Jones
Performer - Peter AB Wilson
Music - John Nguyen
Costume - Osamu Miyagi
Dress - Craig Braybrook
Proximate Edifice was the winner of the 2011 Best Dance Award in the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
This review first appeared in The Age Newspaper
Melenie Crowe Dance
Performed at Dancehouse, as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival
5 October, 2011
Danced by a skilled bunch of young professionals, Melenie Crowe's double bill Duality is mildly entertaining though roughly hewn work.
Gretchen’s Mind, a physical exploration of mental illness, struggles to avoid clichés. The mature presence of actor/dancer Meredith Kitchen provides a useful anchor for the younger artists, who mostly lack the butoh-type intensity required to pull off Crowe’s dramatic demands. A teddy bear, white night-gowns and strobe lights are sure-fire anguish inducers.
Evolution/Devolution eschews narrative, relying instead on dynamic movement. Insectoid shapes and twitching, twisting sequences are set to pounding electronic music with lurid, flashing lights. Lone male, Alya Manzart, cuts a powerful solo, but other sections are disjointed and unimaginative. Syncopated star jumps and knee slides top off a night of contemporary dance that might suit a general TV audience.
Performed by: Alya Manzart, Ashleigh Perrie, Charlotte Humphrey, Jayde MacDonough, Jin Cheng, Lisa Baruta, Lisa Wilson, Meredith Kitchen, Rain Francis & Paris (child performer).
A version of this review appeared in The Age newspaper.
Belong
Bangarra Dance Theatre
Playhouse, The Arts Centre, Melbourne
September 16, 2011
For the past 20 years, Bangarra's artistic director Stephen Page has led the company from strength to strength, creating powerful dance theatre while encouraging the emergence of other choreographic voices.
One of those choreographers is Elma Kris, creator of About, the first piece in this program. An embodiment of the four winds of the Torres Strait Islands, Kris' ancestral home, the work fuses modern dance moves with occasional glimpses of traditional shapes or gestures.
Unfortunately, the movement lacks dynamic variation and choreographic complexity, and despite assured dancing and an attractive set design (by Jacob Nash), the ancestral stories are lost beneath the glossy surface.
Page’s latest work, ID, is an accomplished, occasionally shocking exploration of what makes up the identity of indigenous Australians today.
It begins with a filmed sequence of an older aboriginal woman and the dancers, who step out of the video and onto the stage. A solo by Daniel Riley McKinley is particularly striking, with sharply isolated wrist to head gestures contrasted against expansive, elastic moves.
Graphic images of a corpse being dismembered and death in custody remind us of the grisly past and present of relations with white Australia, though the violence is balanced by the beauty of totemic dance featuring a fabulously lit set of hollow gum trees.
Snaking through time under the steady gaze of a painted elder, family and culture continue on, represented by the traditional tap-step of the hunched dancers.
ID barely diverges from Page's established style, but it’s no less enjoyable for that.
Originally published in The Age newspaper
Kevin Jackson and Madeleine Eastoe, photo by Jeff Busby
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Romeo & Juliet
Performed by The Australian Ballet
State Theatre, the Arts Centre, Melbourne
September 13, until September 24, 2011
There’s been a huge weight of expectation surrounding this new, full-length Graeme Murphy ballet. His Swan Lake and Nutcracker challenged conventions and won hearts. Now, Murphy tackles Romeo and Juliet, retaining the bones of Shakespeare’s tragic tale and much of the Prokofiev score, but bravely shedding any concrete allusions to time and place.
Storytelling is Murphy’s great strength. Propelled by exceptional performances from the dancers, his choreography embodies the violent delights of young love and the pitiful sight of its untimely end. Through skittish runs en pointe we notice Juliet’s youth, while Romeo’s swooping arabesque turns illustrate his prodigious burst of passion. In the title roles Madeleine Eastoe and Kevin Jackson are terrific, growing naturally from cheeky innocence to their distraught and decisive final moments.
The trajectory of their relationship is flawlessly developed in their pas de deux. From tentative beginnings to intimate embraces, delicately intertwining arm motifs and challenging balances and lifts, Murphy combines virtuosity with structural depth and pathos.
The playfully bawdy physicality of Daniel Gaudiello’s Mercutio and the intensely protective ferocity of Andrew Kylian as Tybalt counterbalance the romantic tenderness, with supporting roles also brilliantly devised and enacted.
Gerard Manion’s attractive sets switch rapidly between exotic locations, beginning with a sword fight in fair Verona and moving on to an Indian bazaar, a Buddhist temple and finally a bed of yellow skulls in the Sahara desert. The unstable setting points to the universal themes of the story, arguably a fantastically visionary contrivance or a clunky colonialist folly. Either way, the time-space shifts seem outrageously oblique in an otherwise linear narrative.
Other dramatic devices read with greater success. Freeze frames allow important characters to stand out in crowded scenes. Adam Bull is the embodiment of death in the newly invented Prince of Darkness role, skulking around the mortals, haunting their steps and influencing their fate.
Akira Isogawa’s divine costumes are equally as fascinating as Murphy’s choreography, both are endowed with beautiful detail and flair. Outfits and action are particularly well matched in the Capulet ballroom, a glamorous and spiky affair, with stiffly splayed fingers and gowns in icy tones.
Damien Cooper’s lighting makes the most of the richly designed space, while Jason Lam’s digital projections add another layer of depth and transformation.
Although this lavish exploration of death-marked love brings out the best in the Australian Ballet, its roving scenes are a gamble that do not always pay off.
First published in The Age newspaper
Choreography by Soo Yeun Yoo and Gina Rings
Dancehouse, Melbourne
June 2, 2011
Choreographed by two women from very different backgrounds, Reliquary combines indigenous Australian and shamanistic Korean influences to create a distinctive meditation on ancestry and spirituality.
According to Soo Yeun Yoo, the two cultures share common spiritual roots. Using dance and beautifully crafted puppets to obliquely visit these intersections, Yoo and co-creator Gina Rings have produced a sacred space, shrouded in mist, where ceremonies are practiced and spirits enter the physical realm.
The dancers, three women of Asian descent and two indigenous Australian men, perform movement which ranges from traditional forms to modern abstraction and a blended, contemporary style. Former Bangarra dancer Albert David grounds the piece with his mature presence and earthy grace, while Lilian Grace Steiner and Eric William Avery shine in a powerful sequence of rippling, trance-like moves.
Whether hunting with spear and boomerang, or communing with a white tulle apparition, a heightened sense of spirituality remains. The two beautiful puppets, one with white mask and costume, the other an indigenous woman in colonial dress, appear as ancestral guides, gently nudging the performers. At one point, the masked puppet walks forward on the legs of a dancer, melding human and spiritual forms.
The sound, by Philippe Pasquier, is an evocative and sophisticated blend of natural, electronic and human noise, from breathy beats to didgeridoo, bushland chirping to mellow song.
Reliquary is rich in atmosphere, with strong contributions from the collaborating artists. While there are clunky moments in the choreography, particularly in the more contemporary sections, it’s a fascinating window into ritual dance.
A version of this review was published in The Age newspaper
JACK Productions
Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse, Melbourne
May 20, 2011 (until May 28)
Choreographed by Lucas Jervies, Animal plays with metaphysics and non-human shapes. Chairs, hens, apes, moody women and even the odd Jesus Christ pose are thrown together in episodic fragments, without leading the audience to any definite conclusions about the choreographer’s intentions.
It’s performed by five mature ladies, including Kirsty Martin, current principal artist with the Australian Ballet, and highly respected former dancers Lisa Pavane, Alida Chase, Shane Carroll and Christine Howard.
Dressed in different combinations of black trousers and tops, possibly from their own wardrobes, the women step up onto the glossy black stage which is set between two opposing seating banks. They look around, curious, disorientated. They discover hidden doors in the floor of the stage, and each takes out an ingeniously folded wooden chair.
What follows is a rather banal sequence of position changes, shifting chairs and bodies in jerky but non-dancerly moves. It culminates in a dinner table arrangement, but Jervies fails to capitalise on the dramatic potential here. Instead, his protagonists look every which way except at each other and gradually splinter away. The same pattern of gradual build up to a point which then dissolves occurs several times, so that there is never a sense of climax, or progression.
Pavane and Martin duet on a human-as-metaphysical-furniture theme, with Pavane manipulating her chair and Martin emulating those shapes. It’s a simple premise, which could work if the two were able to get the timing exactly right.
Another duet, between Martin and Carroll, is more complex and far more interesting. Standing close and facing each other, they develop a relationship, something like that of mother and daughter, with Carroll at first mirroring the younger dancer’s actions, joined at the fingertips. Their arms entwine, but the mood shifts, becomes slightly combative, as Carroll’s attempts to invade Martin’s space are slapped away. Fingers aimed at groin, chest, face, fail to reach their mark. Eventually they come to rest on the floor, lying as though asleep.
In a solo for Martin, Jervies makes good use of her supple back to illustrate the common evolution of man image, from a beast on all fours to the upright shape we bear today. Again, it’s quite a simple idea, but Martin’s precise execution, including the jutting jaw of early hominids and the gradual lengthening of her spinal column, makes it worthwhile.
Less transparent is the repeated inclusion of a crucifixion-like pose. And the unfortunate combination of a sustained squat with an awfully loud raspy sound, which my juvenile mind automatically associated with toilet-humour.
That same squatting action, which turns these elegant women into a flock of flustered hens, appears to have been created by repetition of the earlier phrase of chair shifting, minus the chairs. It’s a blunt equation, people less furniture equals animals, and one that doesn’t translate effectively to the stage in this example.
Alas, the often harsh lighting and jarring sound don’t give us any further insight into Jervies’ choreographic vision.
JACK Productions have adopted the motto arrive excited, leave inspired.
And I do get excited about seeing new work by JACK. I love the idea of innovation in classical dance, of using the wonderful skills of ballet dancers to create something beyond fairy tales and ethereal beauty.
Which makes the two performances I’ve seen so far (this one, and Human Abstract in 2010) doubly disappointing. Particularly with Animal, as the concept of a piece designed for some of Australia’s finest mature dancers is very appealing.
Unfortunately, both productions have seemed overstretched, both in terms of movement material and concept development. Which is understandable for a tiny, fledgling company, working on scant resources. Understandable, but not necessarily forgivable. If these are sketches, then they should be sold as such. Continuing to present half-baked work in the main theatres at the CUB Malthouse, which is also home to the Malthouse Theatre’s subscription season of highly polished productions, is not good form. While it’s a bold move, it makes JACK look poor in comparison to other work recently seen in the same space, and it reflects badly on an already marginalised artform.
There is certainly a place in Melbourne for experimental choreography, but without several choreographic development periods and a dedicated production budget, a mainstream theatre is probably not the right fit for JACK to be presenting this type of work. A smaller scale, more intimate showing, with the possibility of further rehearsals, research and dramaturgical assistance would lead to a much finer product, and a higher likelihood of leaving us inspired.
Fran Swinn Trio with Eugene Ball and Rockie Stone
BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne
May 6 2011, as part of the Melbourne Jazz Fringe Festival
When watching live circus, I often find myself holding my breath. I get caught up in the riskiness of the act. My instinct to breathe disappears, squeezed out by the combination of sympathetic fear and hope for the performer. Then when I do remember to catch some air, it’s usually sucked into my lungs in order to whoop and holler my appreciation at the successful completion of a stunt.
This was certainly the case when I saw the premiere of Inform, a truly synergistic performance for jazz quartet and circus artist.
Rockie Stone has been performing circus for quite a while, with Circus Oz amongst others. Her material hasn’t changed substantially, but years of hard work have lent her an elastic strength and quietly assured presence, not to mention several flawless routines. Whether in an inverted balance atop a stack of chairs, or making the corde lisse look as sturdy as a pole, her skills are silky smooth.
In Inform, Stone’s physical dexterity was impeccably matched by joyously resonant sound composed by Fran Swinn. Standing to one side of the stage, the responsive and varied jazz/pop numbers were performed live by the Fran Swinn trio, with the addition of special guest trumpeter Eugene Ball. Interesting textures and rhythms combined with soulful tunes made it not only immensely enjoyable to listen to, but carefully crafted to meet the pitch of Stone’s contribution.
Particularly satisfying was the way each element made space for and enhanced the other. When suspense was called for, Swinn provided it subtly but persuasively. When the music wanted our attention, Stone faded to stillness.
It’s a simple concept which was deftly arranged and executed brilliantly. Inform brought out the best of both music and circus, presenting a closely knit collaboration which was surprising, exciting and beautiful. I held my breath, and hollered.
Photo by Byron Perry
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Choreographed by Antony Hamilton
Performed outdoors, in Melbourne
March 2011, as part of Dance Massive
Approaching the site, it’s dark. Scratchy, alien noises are emanating from the car stereo. Under a soaring concrete overpass, we stop, huddled in our vehicle.
Dust-coloured creatures are visible, holding on to each other as if to avoid being separated in a storm. They are dressed for the elements, wearing boots, craftily aged jackets and pants, outfits reminiscent of a previous decade, possibly borrowed from the set of Star Wars. Occasionally lights flash, briefly illuminating the bridge above. We have been transported to another world, or at least another age.
Gradually the shuffling of the three hooded beings develops into idiosyncratic movement. Isolated, insular, the sense of otherness is heightened by these unfamiliar manoeuvres. Standing closely together, their appearance and actions have a tribal likeness.
It’s a technique choreographer Antony Hamilton has employed before, though this spears to be a more sophisticated stage in the evolution of his style. Small movements, inspired by hip hop but with a focus on spatial and rhythmic invention, popping through the torso and arms of a group of closely placed dancers.
After several minutes, something changes… they leave. Enter a woman, bare breasted, dragging a long, smooth tree branch. She begins a sequence of spinning, gathering momentum until the wooden limb is airborne. The contrast of her soft flesh against the unbending timber is painfully marked, the weight of it pressing against her body as she swings it. There is something ritualistic, pagan, ancient but also naïve in the scene. Like a child in the wilderness, or a priestess enacting a sacred dance, it’s primal, simple, unaffected.
The dust creatures return, surrounding the newcomer. The sense of tribalism and ritual is heightened when they begin a unified sequence of rhythmic stamping and hand movements. There’s a sense of danger, desperation and exhaustion. Is she being converted, captured, or saved?
Intermittent grids of light flash and move across the roof of this post-industrial space, which could just as easily be a scorched planet in another galaxy as a post-apocalyptic earth. Viewing it through the prism of a car windscreen adds to the sense of unreality. We could be at the drive in, watching a sci-fi movie, or in our own personal space-pod, observing alien life forms. It’s a pleasant change to the ubiquitous black box theatre experience, and Hamilton’s ambitious scenario easily justifies the outdoor setting.
The four dancers are totally committed, the sound broadcast to our car stereo by Robin Fox is out of this world, Paula Levis’s costumes are worthy of a film-set and the site specific projections by Kit Webster are sparse enough to be a constant surprise, subtle enough not to intrude and so well focussed as to appear native to the space.
It begs the question, why don’t we have more site specific dance in Melbourne? Maybe this production will spark a new wave of thoughtfullly devised ventures outside the theatre.
Performed by Alisdair Macindoe, Jess Wong, Melanie Lane, and Lily Paskas as the intruder.
