DANCE MASSIVE Reviews
The Weight of the Thing Left its Mark
Director/Choreographer: Shaun McLeodPerformers/Choreographers: Olivia Millard, Paul Romano, Sophia Cowen, Luke Hickmott
Sound: Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey
Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
Improvised work by its very nature carries an ever-present sense of risk. There will often be failures, but those who embrace working in or watching improvised forms will recognise that those failures balance the intense successes – the times where things just come together magnificently. Those successes are inherently heightened by the presence, or at least the possibilities, of the failures.
This strange binary of risk is an element of every form of live performance. It is what differentiates live work from any kind of recording, whether dance, music, theatre, or some hybrid. Audiences seem strangely electrified by the vulnerabilities, exposure, and uncertainties faced by all performers the moment they step on stage. It’s rather perverted. And also slightly peculiar because, really, no audience member truly wants to see a performer fail. But it seems to be that abstract risk factor which imbues live performance with some of its mystique and value.
This argument is more applicable to improvisation than any other performance genre. As an audience member I’m not terribly fond of the risk factor, although I often think I should be, and feel guilty for seeking reassurance and security. So, for me, The Weight of the Thing was the perfect improvisation work: there was a lot of safety there and not necessarily a lot of risk. I found the lack of rawness comforting and beautiful, while recognising that it also divulges a certain lack of immediacy, presence (that abstract word again), and depth which might be possible through less safe modes.
Unlike some improvised works, McLeod’s contains a very definite sense of structure. The improvisation happens within a rather neat set of narrative frames, and it is often clear what the ‘rules’ behind improvisation have been: how the four dancers were working with each other, and also when one section ended and another began. At first I found this interrupted any sense of flow, but then I began to think of the sections like the movements in a musical work: like linked sketches describing one large image.
McLeod’s four dancers – Olivia Millard, Paul Romano, Sophia Cowen, and Luke Hickmott – inhabit a sometimes nightmarish domestic space also colonised by swarms of cutlery and by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey’s delicate improvised soundscape, while not always adventurous, the sound is a strong partner in the creation of a focused energy throughout.
Interactions swing wildly between conflicted and loving, with the cutlery inscribing now fear, now desperately clinging adoration between the characters the dancers embody. The ‘weight’ of the title invokes for me a weight of desire, a weight of need, a weight of being so intimately and claustrophobically connected with lovers, friends, and family that you can barely breathe.
One of the things I enjoyed most about this work was the empathetic connections between the dancers. Whether moving together or watching each other, there was a compelling sense that each individual’s presence was of greatest consequence, fascination, and import to each other, and this also extended to the audience. It inscribed a cohesive ‘weight’ of consciousness across the work and the experience.
Certainly not all sections of the work succeeded. But that just reminds us of the nature of risk (even when mediated, here, by reassuring structure and a certain level of restriction/reservation -- perhaps even uncomfortable performativity?).
Highlights for me included four simultaneous ‘studies in cutlery’ – explorations by each dancer of a fork or spoon, sometimes a familiar extension of a limb, sometimes an unknown foreign object; Romano and Hickmott’s aching duet filled with compulsive and near-destructive embrace and a simultaneous yearning for solitude; and Hickmott’s strange pitchfork solo, where the weight of the thing was tangible and elegant.
The Revery Alone
Director/Choreographer/Composer: Billy CowiePerformer: Eleonore Ansari
Review by Wendy Newton
Perhaps the clue is in the misspelled title of this melodic work.
‘The Revery Alone’ is one of three 3D installations from Stereoscopic Director/choreographer/composer Billy Cowie in the Dance on Film program at Arts House, and it is fascinating in both its abstraction and illusion.
From the comfort of strategically placed mats around a darkened room, we watch as a naked dancer appears to hang from the ceiling above, her hands and feet gripping handles as if she is fighting the gravitational pull to fall. Performer Eleonore Ansari mesmerises with her slow, controlled movements and feline postures. The screen is her stage, confining her range of movement in both breadth and depth, almost claustrophobically, as hands and feet pass from hold to hold, and her body sways and stretches to its absolute muscular limit.
The background score is soothing, repetitive, mellifluous, and it lulls like a cradlesong. This is not music from this time or this place; perhaps it is something played in deep space and the dancer is truly moving through another dimension or gravity. Maybe it is a chimera, after all, and the music is something only dreamed.
‘The Revery Alone’ is a study in movement, in grace, in the corporeality of dance on film. But the question remains…is the dancer really hanging there or is this a trick of the camera? She bends backwards, her face upside down, her eyes looking directly into mine and there is a slow understanding that passes between us: the only important thing is, the body must move.
Now Now Now
Choreographer: Luke GeorgePerformers: Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey, Luke George
Design/Production: Benjamin Cisterne
Dramaturg: Martyn Coutts
Costumes: Ede Strong and the cast
Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
Now Now Now was my last experience at Dance Massive, and my third brush with improvisation. My first (Rosalind Crisp's No one will tell us...) was characterised by, and fraught with, a philosophical anxiety about understanding improvised work; the second (Shaun McLeod's The Weight of the Thing Left its Mark) saturated in a guilty pleasure at the comforts of structural, narrative, and aesthetic certainty; this third experience is still a bit of a mystery to me.
It didn't really get off on the right foot – on an unexpectedly hot Melbourne March evening (at least 30º), Dancehouse's small foyer was smotheringly packed with a full-house audience who had to queue interminably to collect pre-booked tickets, then wait more than 20 minutes beyond the show's advertised starting time before being asked to remove our shoes and enter the curtained and white-felt-lined auditorium, which was suffocatingly warm. Perhaps it isn't fair to discuss prosaic details, but they certainly made it hard to feel generous about the show we were about to experience. And another good reason to mention it is that the more engaging sections of the show did manage to overcome such inauspicious beginnings and genuinely entertain.
I use the word 'entertain' quite deliberately: where Crisp's work was physically and intellectually demanding, and McLeod's (sometimes self-consciously) lyrical, Now Now Now is brimming with humour, ridicule, even triviality and a willingness not to take itself too seriously. And mixed in, a few sequences of more contemplative improvisation, including a rather vibrant text-based segment; isolated fragments of dialogue escape each dancer's mouth and slowly, through seemingly erratic repetition and rearrangement, begin to form an unexpected unification, with the scene dispersing before becoming too weighty.
Like McLeod's work, Now Now Now (despite proclaiming that it explores the question, 'can we be in the now?') is heavily structured and replicable. Within each new segment or improvisational game, presumably there is a degree of freedom, but often, the 'now' seems elusive or at least illusory.
The work is frequently indulgent, occasionally irritating (the extended blackout in such heat was almost panic-inducing; and the perplexing presence of an obscured television or monitor seemed to occupy too much of the dancers’ attention, closing them off from their audience with whom at other times they make concerted efforts to connect), and often throroughly amusing. One sequence involves all three dancers simultaneously, frenetically, rhythmically and emphatically announcing whatever each one is seeing ('foot! foot! foot!/audience! audience! audience!/lighting bar! lighting bar! lighting bar!'). What began as a silly cacophony became – through the performers' commitment and senses of humour – irresistibly funny, and it occasionally still echoes in my memory as I go about my daily business... 'blinking cursor! blinking cursor! blinking cursor!'
Connected - Chunky Move
Director/Choreographer: Gideon Obarzanek
Sculpture: Reuben Margolin
Composers: Oren Ambarchi, Robin Fox
Lighting Designer: Benjamin Cisterne
Costume Designer: Anna Cordingly
Performers: Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Josh Mu, Marnie Palomares, Harriet Ritchie
Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
Chunky Move’s latest production marries an exquisite installation by American sculptor Reuben Margolin with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek’s ‘installation’ of moving bodies.
Describing a work like this felt counterproductive.
For me, the most honest and dynamic response is a ‘creative’ one. A kind of prose poem dreamed up inside the emotional space into which Connected welcomed me.
***
Reuben Margolin : ‘There’s two different ways to approach art. And they’re both true. And one of them is that the world is a beautiful place. And it’s full of highlights, and it’s full of sparkles. And it’s full, you know, kind of... dawns and dusk and mystery, beauty... And the other one is that it has a structure behind it [...] And to me, the... the difference between the two ways of sort of looking at the world is sort of the difference between whether you are reaching out to touch the world, or whether you’re letting the world touch you.’
- Part of a discussion with Gideon Obarzanek and Reuben Margolin on the Malthouse Theatre’s YouTube channel
***
Reconnected
Imagine a loom.
Imagine the two of us.
Imagine a thread. A hundred threads.
A breathing, soothing, suffocating web of all we have been and all we can be.
And there it is: above us, around us, between us, connecting us, restricting us, contouring us, protecting us, mapping us, celebrating us, archiving us, and preventing us from ever moving forwards, backwards, or even sidewards from where we are.
It is a complex net of mathematical equations, modelling each and every moment of contact between us. The first time I touched your skin – there, that thread, and its interaction across an axis of memory. There – that curl and twist of the cloth, that is our last misunderstanding.
We created it. But now its tangles are our tears and ridicule. And the space is empty of us.
***
I used to love you, you know. I can’t imagine when it was that things began to change. But it was like something unravelling at unbearable speed. A breathless loss and the watching of something undone. Something once beautiful and careful. Something safe.
It’s just that it wasn’t a mystery, any more, once we stopped touching. I knew you too well, and we read each other with too much history and not enough empathy. I tried to let go of the things that mattered to me, so that you could still breathe the way you needed to. And you tried the same, I do realise. But it was our habits that knotted us together, and they relied on us as much as we did on them. And without the tangles there was nothing left to Us.
But this isn’t how the story was supposed to go.
There was this one time – do you remember this? – when you took me to the beach. And I’d never swum in the sea, only in the river near where my grandfather lived in the wooden cottage left by an apple picker before him. It was a freak of a hot day in mid-March, and we drove the three hours in your old green two-door. No air conditioning. Except none of our cars had air conditioning then, so I only add that part now, looking back.
I would have been scared of the sea if I’d stopped to think about it. But I was caught up in other things. Watching you. Learning you. Being a part of the thing that wrapped around us two. I don’t think I told you I’d never swum in the sea.
It breathed around me, swallowed me, heaved me up again, forgot me, embraced me. I wanted to know what drowning felt like.
***
You pull me closer, and I feel lost. You push me away, and I am claustrophobic. I try to touch you, but instead there is just the memory of Us. There’s an illusion of strength, when really all that’s there is this incredible fragility, and anyone who’s anyone can see that.
A cloud of our thoughts hangs above us, impermeable like a thunderstorm, porous like skin. Your frustration weaves its way through my desperation and we’re trapped and comforted by the cloth we weave around each other. It breathes with us and expands and contracts as we bless each other’s sadness.
I can see you straining against the weight of it: all our history and entanglement. It’s a beautiful, beautiful weight and it holds you in arcs and inclines of peace and anticipation, and your resistance against it is full of intent and integrity. But I see your exhaustion and I want to lift that weight away from you so just for one moment you can breathe. Or perhaps I want to cut you away from me?
And at the moment I release you I see that it was a mistake. With nothing to heave against, your heart falls slack and you are empty.
Gone.
But it is still there: above us, around us, between us, connecting us, restricting us, contouring us, protecting us, mapping us, celebrating us, archiving us, and preventing us from ever moving forwards, backwards, or even sidewards from where we are.
Connected - Chunky Move
Director/Choreographer: Gideon Obarzanek
Sculpture: Reuben Margolin
Composers: Oren Ambarchi, Robin Fox
Lighting Designer: Benjamin Cisterne
Costume Designer: Anna Cordingly
Performers: Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Josh Mu, Marnie Palomares, Harriet Ritchie
Review by Wendy Newton
It would be a mistake to believe the dancers are the only performers in Connected. This is a richly layered work by Chunky Move’s Director/Choreographer Gideon Obarzanek in collaboration with Californian sculptor Reuben Margolin; a diptych in dance and theatre connected by the quiet unfolding of a ‘living’ sculpture and an electric score by Oren Ambarchi and Robin Fox that pounds with an almost physical narrative.
The stage is set with Margolin’s kinetic sculpture, a giant wooden loom with innumerable luminescent threads suspended over the empty space. Already the performance has begun. It is a da Vincian study of machine, imagination and the promise of flight. The program tells me that it is 17th century engineering, but it sits out of time like all invention. And art.
A dancer throws herself across the stage; it is a tumbling, a writhing, a frenetic hurtling to the jangling industrial music that punches into the space. It is a practiced freefalling form joined by other dancers frantic to unite and separate, as the techno music pulses like a charge snapped from the main; ricocheting and loose, punctuating the movement. Two dancers move together as if acquiring the other’s kinetic energy, an impulse born of Newton’s Cradle, as they connect and divert by the force of the other's trajectory; bodies drawn into each other’s orbit, pulled and repelled, as if in slow motion. It is a perceptual guidance: they are bending light waves in a mirage of dance to wonder at.
But it is the quiet activity across the stage that begins to draw the eye.
A dancer methodically starts connecting the sculpture’s strings with magnetic strips of paper. It is a meditation on making, vivid and fascinating against the wild distraction of constant motion; a moment of pure concentration that requires nothing more than a slow, steady building. The dancer leaves but others join; it is a collaboration of making, a reverential melange of purpose.
The languorous allure of the sculpture comes alive as dancers are bodiced to its threads. The dancers shift and sway, the sculpture floats and lifts and turns and drops like a sigh. It is unfolding and luminescent, it moves on waves of light, it is the wave. In a tender moment, a sole male dancer still held by its strings draws the sculpture to the lips of a waiting female dancer. This is no lofty object; it is an intimate expression of earthly love.
Contrast this to the second act where the theme of disconnection is palpable.
The sculpture is now set in a gallery, its movement enacted by a mechanised pulley. It is an automated machine, still moving, but devoid of human touch; plugged in on life support, rather than living. Dormant, but not dreaming. The dancers become gallery guards who, through voiceovers from actual security guards, relate the monotony of their role. It is distraction, rather than connection, a disguise by circumstance. Gone is the loving reverence in work, the meaning in the making, for nothing is made here – not even feeling. The sculpture is object and commodity; it has succumbed to the anaesthesia of the gallery guards. The moment asks us what the real value of art is – to maker, to viewer. Is there life beyond the making?
Perhaps the answer lies in the final sequence, when the pounding music surges again like a shock, stripping the guards of their uniforms and personas, and reanimating the sculpture like a crash-cart. Living again, it gently descends, enveloping the guards in a final moment of touch.
Perhaps the answer lies in whether we believe we possess art, or whether art possesses us.
Connected is structure and grace, engineering and allegory, production and poem. Atom and dream. A constant collaboration between each, where one does not crowd or hide the other. An exquisite hybrid arts performance of logic and feeling. It is heaven and earth, but the real territory is us. We knock, we bounce, we crack, we cry, we follow our own or a new trajectory. But first we connect.
In Glass
Choreographer: Narelle BenjaminComposer: Huey Benjamin
Visual Designer: Samuel James
Costume Designer: Tess Schofield
Lighting Designer: Karen Norris
Producer: Rosalind Richards
Performers: Kristina Chan, Paul White
Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
In Narelle Benjamin’s In Glass, Kristina Chan and Paul White are suspended in a space bordered by mirror, calling to mind the reflective and reflexive quietude of a rehearsal studio, but never particularly acknowledging this allusion. On the contrary, the work initially seems purely about organisms moving through space, sometimes impacting on each other, but rarely exploring the psychological, or the intersections of personality.
This isn’t a reprimand: Chan and White move so fluidly together that, particularly in the early sections, they are eminently watchable and there is a certain liberation in observing a physicality without persona. With the aid of Huey Benjamin’s (sometimes excruciatingly) New-Age-ish soundtrack, the experience is one of observing some strange sea creatures of the deep, perplexing but patently controlled in an almost evolutionary sense. Or a beautiful piece of machinery in which every intersection of its parts occurs in exactly the right way and at the right time.
Unfortunately, as the more psychosexual narratives emerge, the titular symbolism is lost, and the great potential of the reflective surfaces is rarely realised: the mirrors’ presence is at best incidental, at worst pointless, and for the most part downright uninventive. In one oddly emotive sequence – amongst such a meditative absence of ego – White carefully spins two large oval mirrors against the floor, holds them up, licks them (perhaps a mythical allusion – Narcissus?), and generally twiddles them. It’s largely uninteresting: sightlines in the Malthouse’s Beckett Theatre seem to preclude, for most audience members, any useful view of the reflective surfaces and instead we’re watching an otherwise accomplished dancer muck around with two unwieldy and unattractive props. Mirrors are not always magnanimous with their reflections and the choreography fails to overcome this practical challenge.
In their best moments the large ‘mirrors’ are cleverly manipulated so that they both reflect what is before them and reveal what is behind, or so that they swallow dancers whole. But at other times they are cluttered with a series of digital projections alternating between uncomfortable sentimentality and weighty artistic expressionism. With two such poetic dancers present, why try to embellish the work with anything that distracts from a simple elegance of bodies in space? Why not just embrace the indulgently romantic movement?
And speaking of unfathomable, why on earth did White have to make four meaningless costume changes, between almost indistinguishably neutral costumes?!
There were just too many disappointments in this work, detracting from the satisfying conversation choreographed for two skilful and compatible dancers.
In Glass
Choreographer: Narelle Benjamin
Composer: Huey Benjamin
Visual Designer: Samuel James
Costume Designer: Tess Schofield
Lighting Designer: Karen Norris
Producer: Rosalind Richards
Performers: Kristina Chan, Paul White
Review by Wendy Newton
The symbolism of the mirror has long been used to explore and represent a variety of implicit themes in the arts: self-reflection; introversion; ego; vanity; illusion; duality; deception. In Glass by Choreographer Narelle Benjamin is a sublimely choreographed and exquisitely danced work that unfortunately suggests far more than it reveals.
The performance begins in the dark, with dancer Paul White searching the stage for Kristina Chan, who appears to be asleep. All he has is a pinpoint torch to light the way and the yearning to discover his slumbering anima. Then begins the dance of fascination with the other, the fascination with the self. The desire to merge, the desire for freedom. The exploration of dream, reality, love, longing, ego, of sensual innocence and erotic craving.
Dancers Chan and White are mesmerising in their relationship to each other and in the fluidity of their movements. At times their individuality merges; you cannot tell which arm is which, where one starts, where the other ends. It is a contortion of symmetry, a symbiotic love affair in movement. It is inordinately skilful and deeply moving. The mellow but targeted lighting emphasises each vein, each muscle; it is beauty intensified, idealised, spotlighted for its own sake. It is chest, forearm, back, we see, obscuring the whole that would shatter the illusion of perfection in the dance of love.
But the psyche has many strata, and the mirrors tell a story, too. Through projections we see altered worlds, ephemeral yet perpetual dances in another reality, layers of consciousness that morph with the physical dancing. The mirrors reflect, deflect, light, obscure, deny, reveal and hide their movement, their expression – from the audience, from each other. Chan and White move in and out of them, physically and reflectively, the mirrors gateways to the inaccessible parts of themselves and their relationship.
At times the lush layering of images in the mirrors is a distraction to the immediacy and sensuality of the physical dancers whose corporeal presence is eclipsed by the too-clever technology. Other times, the images were banal, (Chan reaches up and plucks an apple from a tree in the nether world of the mirror, disappearing into it to run through an Edenic orchard), and disappointed. The magnificence of Chan’s and White’s dancing was enough in its simple physical splendour.
A mirror reflects truth and reveals faults, much like the work that is In Glass. The movement of the dancers is an exquisite interplay of physical skill and poetic expression, at times transcending the bounds of individuality and earthly possibility. It is supremely beautiful. I enjoyed it for its aesthetics and sheer physicality, but I’m not sure that these parts are enough to create a meaningful whole. Like the reflection in one of its mirrors, the beauty of In Glass is insubstantial, a fleeting veneer that leaves no lasting impression beyond the gaze.
No one will tell us...
Choreographer/Performer: Rosalind Crisp
Live Performance: Andrew Morrish
Live Music: Hansueli Tischhauser
Lighting/Technical Director: Marco Wehrspann
Production: Rosalind Crisp-Omeo Dance
Co-producers: Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson, CDC/Biennale nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne, CDC Paris Réseau (Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson, L'étoile du nord, micadanses-ADDP, studio Le regard du Cygne-AMD XXe), Ministère de la culture et de la communication / DRAC Ile-de-France.
Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
It isn’t every day you have the privilege of watching artists so influential and respected in their fields. But then, sometimes such reverence comes posthumously, and improvised dance is about being present in the moment, not creating Enduring Works of Sublime Art. Or possibly that’s just my sparse and academic appreciation of this Thing called Dance Improvisation?
I’m not a dancer. I’m not a dance academic. I’m a writer and reviewer with a background in theatre and a reasonable (and developing) dance literacy. I come to the field with a respect both for the expertise and precision required of trained bodies, and for the freedom of expression/presence/experience that it can allow dancers unbound by choreography. And I come with some understanding of the principles, processes and possibilities of ‘improvisation’ as a form.
I’m not completely uninformed.
And yet. And yet, I am flummoxed when it comes to reading/accessing the work of an artist like Rosalind Crisp. And this work, on this occasion, was being performed to a very tight-knit ‘inner circle’ of contemporary dancers, makers, choreographers – really the ‘who’s who’ of a certain sector of Australia’s dance community. And they get Crisp’s work. They’ve known her oeuvre for many years and they are immersed in the scholarship, the practice, the experience, the principles, and the beliefs of this kind of movement. (The camaraderie is palpable and alienating.) My basic understanding of Crisp’s history and of some of the fundamentals of the work are close to useless in actually appreciating what she does.
Maybe I’m being a bit dramatic. But I’ve been wrestling with this frustration and bafflement for days now: how does work like this speak to a non-dance audience? What is it that Crisp wants to offer us, or provoke us with, or affect us with? Or does she make work purely for herself and for an audience of dancers and improvisers, and not for us at all? Or is it just my own dilemma, and other watchers are less fraught? (I have a sneaking suspicion that the latter may be true...)
I should be more specific.
In ‘No one will tell us...’ (the original title continued, ‘when it’s the end of the world’), Crisp collaborates with performer Andrew Morrish and musician Hansueli Tischhauser for a sixty-minute improvised work in which there’s little rest for performers and, though we’re seated and still, none for audience either. The three bodies in the space feel very independent of each other with moments and sequences of intersection, which were where I felt most capable of ‘entering’ the work. In between, it isn’t always easy to see the connection between Crisp’s movement, Tischhauser’s loop-pedal-rich electric guitar, and Morrish’s linguistic humour with an absurdist tendency and occasional earnest highlights of slightly awkward movement. (Or even to know whether there is such a connection, or whether it’s absurd – and counter to the work’s intentions – to search for one.)
Crisp herself moves with a remarkable vocabulary, one which seems composed of anger, tension, humility, determination, humour, enquiry, certainty, and immediacy. Had I asked, any one of those collegial audience members would no doubt have passionately advocated her ability to be completely present in her work, to be fully in the moment. This is slightly cryptic for a non-dancer. What exactly does this presence actually look like in a performance -- how do you observe and experience that as a watcher? For me, it translates into this enormous scope of movement available to her; not once did she repeat a phrase, a gesture, a shape, a moment. And her energy is heightened and seems to infect the other two performers and much of the audience. Sometimes her movement ‘speaks’ so clearly that it is almost like watching a conversation: between Crisp and her collaborators, Crisp and herself, and, on rare moments, Crisp and her audience.
But much of the time I didn’t feel very welcome. Or very necessary. I didn’t feel that my presence, the presence of all of us in the theatre, changed the way they were working. Or, perhaps more importantly, the why they were working. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t enjoy the work: for much of the hour, I did. Which actually rather invalidates what I’m trying to say. (I don’t apologise for my inconsistencies.) But I was saturated with deep doubt and confusion about the role of the audience in improvised work. Indeed, the role of the audience in any performance or artwork, with improvisation simply holding down one end of a long continuum of style. When is art selfish, and when is it about a connection with an audience, an ‘other’? A completely unanswerable question.
And still I’m left wondering how to ‘read’ a work like this. For me, the movement (and the interaction between the three performers) was less a communication than a series of punctuation marks, with all the linking text/language/thought rendered invisible (though apparently still present, somehow internally for the performers). The punctuation was indelible and very often intriguing, but I felt denied access to the intelligible essence between.
Art is categorically not about complete understanding. Or about comfort. Or ease of digestion. Of course it isn’t. But without morsels of those things, art can simply bewilder And maybe that’s what it is sometimes supposed to do.
Dance on Film
Reeldance
Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
Upstairs at Arthouse, above the Sunstruck watchers, dancers on film loop over and over, not caring whether an audience is there. Are they different to ‘live’ dancers, or do audiences just want to believe that dancers mind whether we are there? We want the work to be about us, about communication with us, about connection, but what if it isn’t? What if it is only for the performers? And would we know/feel the difference anyway?
Some of these niggling questions are alleviated when we watch dance on film. We’re not confronted with breathing bodies, so it is perhaps easier to detach and to simply watch the work before us, and not to get caught up in the pseudophilosophical concerns about relationships between the performing bodies and watching bodies.
Other than this, what is the defining difference between dance on film and dance on a stage? I should probably warn you, I don’t have a defining answer (and nor do I necessarily think the issue is at all problematic). But I’m interested by the question.
Two of the films I saw at Dance Massive, ‘The Revery Alone’ and ‘Tango de Soledad’ (comprising two thirds of Billy Cowie’s Stereoscopic: the screenings cycle, and the third was not showing on the night I attended) furthered this inquiry for me.
‘Tango’ is a beautiful work, a five-minute solo with a mournful cello soundtrack and a melancholy yet buoyant monologue voiceover. A woman and a chair rest in a room which looks like it is made of an old blackboard, haunted by traces of every sum, every diagram, every sentence ever sketched on it. Her movements are gentle and unsurprising, a kind of ode to the lost companion addressed by the abstract letter in the voiceover (a teacher? student? lover? friend? all of the above?). Oh, and there’s one other important feature. It’s filmed in 3D and when you don the old-school red/blue cardboard and cellophane goggles, the depth of that room is replicated and you might as well be sitting in it.
‘Might as well be.’ So what is the value of putting a conventional work like this on film? Apart from the obvious economic benefits of being able to much more easily tour a work, and even exhibit it simultaneously in multiple locations? (And, possibly, inspiring wonderers like me to idly query the nature and implications of ‘reality’.)
Well, ‘The Revery Alone’ is a perfect example of a dance film which really makes the most of its own form.
Instead of sitting or standing to view, here, the best option is to lie down on one of the comfortable recliners provided. Above your head, a woman hangs, naked, in the space above you, and as your eyes adjust to the unsettling colour of those 3D glasses, she turns and slowly arcs to look over her shoulder, right into your eye and so close you could touch the small mounds of her vertebrae. For seven minutes she hangs above you; slowly adjusting her position on the four handles that her hands and feet cling to; twisting and tangling and inverting her body, all with a mesmeric languor. You lose all sense of perspective, direction, and gravity (which, of course, are illusory) and at the same time it feels remarkably ‘real’ and natural that a dancer be above you. And it is the medium that allows this simultaneously disrupting and satisfying capsizing of reality.
Afterword
When I first went into the room which holds ‘The Revery,’ the image was static, the woman mid-hang, and the room empty of other viewers. My companion and I lay down and watched for a few moments, wondering whether the movement was so slow as to be imperceptible, or whether the work began with a long freeze. After a while, we suspected that probably the projector was misbehaving. But we stayed in that empty room looking at the image for many, many minutes. We stood up and moved around (noting that, incidentally, the 3D image had a strange and eerie Mona Lisa-esque capacity to tilt around the space to follow you!). I wondered, briefly, whether there were people beyond the curtained-off edges of the viewing space, watching us and being entertained by our response and our discussion.
Eventually, we did seek someone to fix the projector for us, and we were so entranced by the work that we lay through two cycles of the projection, feeling equally engaged the second time.
But the point is that we were confronted by that old chestnut: What Is Art? If the work was a static image, with a ‘running time’ of seven minutes, signposted on the door, then how would we respond to it? Was it a dance film equivalent to John Cage’s 4’33’’? What right did we have to expect more than a static image anyway? Or, conversely, what right would the artist have to offer us nothing but that? And what would it mean if that were the work? Perhaps I’m being too esoteric and/or flippant. But the accidental experience really stuck with me, and I thought I’d attempt to ‘review’ it. So. There you have it.
Sunstruck
Concept Collaboration: Helen Herbertson, Ben Cobham
Devised & Directed: Helen Herbertson
Design & Light: Ben Cobham
Physical Realisation: Helen Herbertson, Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville
Performance: Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville
Set Realisation: Alan Robertson
Soundscape: Livia Ruzic
Violin & Cello: Tamil Rogeon, Tim Blake
Production: Bluebottle - Frog Peck
Management: Moriarty's Project
Review by Wendy Newton
The ephemeral can leave a lasting resonance. So it is with Sunstruck, a dance performance full of fleeting moments of exquisite beauty and infinite feeling.
This is dance stripped back to the moment, conjured from seemingly nothing: an empty stage; one light; two dancers; no costumes or props; a violin and cello for the score. The audience is seated in the round, containing the performance, holding it, strange silhouettes that perimeter the landscape and bound the empty space that both defines and restrains the performance.
The staging is deceptively empty, but it is the emptiness that first draws us in; the nothingness is alive with possibility. Dancers Trevor Patrick and Nick Sommerville slowly inhabit the stark space and we are drawn with them into the deprivation: a cry in the dark, a strangled laugh, a careful word, an unfolding of movement as they investigate the space and each other, pushed and pulled by the orbiting light, the dark, the haunting notes of the violin and cello that seem to pluck them as strings, and the uniqueness of moment that activates their imagination.
It is a seduction by movement, gesture, rhythm, sound, atmosphere and a slow-burning intimacy. We see each moment full, if fleeting, and cannot escape the feeling or the experience; we are part of it, it has permeated as if we too are rising and falling with the fluidity of the dance. We are immersed; at the end of the performance, no-one wants to break from the dark, the emptiness, the quiet captivation that has overtaken.
All things are evolving from, or devolving toward, nothingness. But in this constant state of dissolution and inauguration, there is a place rich and alive with imagination, emotion and experience; and it is at the evanescent intersection between stillness and movement, dark and light, absence and longing, where we are all Sunstruck.
Sunstruck
Concept Collaboration: Helen Herbertson, Ben CobhamDevised & Directed: Helen Herbertson
Design & Light: Ben Cobham
Physical Realisation: Helen Herbertson, Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville
Performance: Trevor Patrick, Nick Sommerville
Set Realisation: Alan Robertson
Soundscape: Livia Ruzic
Violin & Cello: Tamil Rogeon, Tim Blake
Production: Bluebottle - Frog Peck
Management: Moriarty's Project
Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
You’re ushered carefully into a very dark space. You are offered sake (or tea, the choice is yours) in a small white cup. You are led to a seat in the circle of chairs in the centre of the dark space (or, if you are unlucky/lucky?, further away, in a line along the raised stage). You are seated. You are a part of a boundary, a threshold, a mark against the space. You are part of what might occur.
‘In’ the circle (mostly) will be two dancers (or just one, at times), two bodies. ‘Outside’ are a single enormous theatre light on a track, an almost-unseen cellist and violinist who peripherally (mostly) inhabit the space with their sound, and quiet moving shadows which might or might not be a director/choreographer/dance-dramaturge, conducting the work.
You’re about to be sunstruck.
Except that ‘struck’ is such a violent word, and one not suited to the tender opus about to happen. There’s a little text, there’s a lot of exploration of the space inside the circle of watchers, and exploration of the flow of those curved boundaries, there are gorgeous intersections between the bodies and the string duo, there are moments of humour, moments of uncertainty, moments of deep loneliness.
This work is different for every audience – even more so than is usually true of any live performance – because the music is improvised live, and the dancers too are ‘live’. They work to a clear structure and shape, but within it they are new each time.
The work offers threshholds: between what is comfortable and what is not; what can be seen/heard/felt and what cannot; what you can understand and what you might not.
* * *
An end is nearing. A crying in the darkness, and a hushing. Somewhere far off, a bird. A little light now – but barely more than a glow, barley a blush of heat – and an exchange between the cello and the violin (low and rich, perhaps on the E string). They’re so close in sound, their difference only measured by their location in space and by their tonal quality. A sad sort of conversation, but with a certain refusal to submit. Not a goodbye, but a resigned, familiar kind of sadness at the impossibility of it all.
And still the warming light is barely an illumination.
And now a man alone in the circle. Was he the crier, or the comforter?
Eyes open, eyes closed – and barely a difference, in the loss of the small light, where all that’s left is a state filled with the taste and texture of sound.
Ending, somewhere, in a long, long stillness so complete that no-one was entirely sure where the silence lack of light came from or would ever go to...
Music for Imagined Dances
Creators: Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey
Technical Support: Jesse Stevens
Lighting Designer: Niklas Pijanti
Review by Anica Boulanger-Mashberg
I love the idea behind this work. I love it so much I can barely express it. I’m obsessed with its poetry and its possibility.
There’s nothing cryptic about the title: Flynn and Humphrey fill an empty room with soundscape and lights, and invite you to people it with your own imagined dancers. This invitation is, for me, so overflowing with potential that I almost couldn’t breathe when I first sat down on the long, low, white bench in the white room.
But the execution of this idea is so poor that I left the experience feeling furious with disappointment. To begin, the space is unfortunately nowhere near soundproof, and while we were there, a nearby electric guitar distracted us from the quieter moments in the soundscape, and even some of the louder ones. One of those ‘louder ones’ was an extended sequence beginning seconds into the work, consisting of a piece so distorted (principally with an effect like speakers blowing out) that it quickly became unlistenable, unpleasant, and therefore extremely distancing. I’m fairly sure this wasn’t the artists’ hope for our reaction, and the estrangement eclipsed any connection that the rest of the experience might have offered.
Soon, coloured lights shone through what had first appeared to be a solid wall, but was now revealed to be lacklustre, pierced chipboard. The large square lights slowly cycled through red, orange, green, blue, and after their first surprise appearance, added absolutely nothing to the experience. Rather they were so irritating and bland that I felt the need to close my eyes for the remaining 25-odd minutes.
I wondered why the work was presented in this way – why not, for example, set the piece in a theatre or a studio, with more evocative lighting, filling the space with shadows and uncertainty, into which we might inject our own imagined dancers, or even be tricked by the space and the familiar theatrical convention into thinking they were really there?
To be fair, there were moments when the small, still space, and the carefully chosen musical extracts in the soundtrack helped me conjure some really beautiful imagined dances, and I enjoyed these moments immensely, revelling in simultaneous wonder about what kinds of performances the four other people in the room might have been ‘seeing’.
But the enduring feeling from this work is one of regret, that the beautiful potential of this concept remained almost entirely unrealised.