This year’s Melbourne Festival program, which runs from 8-25 October, includes five works from two companies and two artists.
Israel’s internationally-renowned Batsheva Dance Company will be presenting two works by artistic director Ohad Naharin, from either end of its repertoire, chronologically speaking.
The first, Decadance, was first created in 1990, although it is a constantly evolving and changing work. Decadance sees Naharin take sections of existing works and reorganise them into a new theatrical experience.
The second, Last Work, premiered in Tel Aviv in June and explores the body’s motion as the most humane, stirring expression of performing art, synthesizing. the infinite spectrum of emotions and sentiment into performance.
Physical Theatre company Peeping Tom, from Belgium, brings 32 Rue Vandenbranden, a hyper-real collision of physicality, cinematic set-design and macabre slapstick. In this Olivier Award winning production, two rickety trailer homes set the scene within a snow-covered landscape – exposed to the elements, under a wide-open sky, six inhabitants of an isolated mountain-top community grapple with a blutted reality and their visceral responses to an inescapable loneliness. The performers contort, bend, jerk and levitate in dizzying scenes of hypnotic movement. Bodies transform and shake to the sound of an unsettling soundtrack, including Bellini, Stravinsky and Pink Floyd.
From China comes choreographer Gu Jiani, with Right&Left, an intricate shadow dance and exploration of our complex, off-kilter relationships to one another. Right&Left combines dance with a mix of projection and light to offer a perspective of one of our oldest questions – why do we love and how do we stop it from destroying who we are? Right&Left is an explotation of humand love and individual experience that uses little more than delicately poised bodies, two chairs and the play of shadows to create a tribute to symmetry.
Australian choreographer Antony Hamilton is known as a wildcard. He will present NYX, a work joining dance, voice and percussion. NYX sees four women contort and writhe in a vast, echoing chamber. Pounding drums supercharge the air as gods and demons vie for supremacy. This is the drama of creation and the divine comedy rolled into one, a place where the body and primitive technology as become one. NYX offers an uncompromising vision of human ingenuity and cruelty, where the masquerade of progress shows itself to be bestial fury by another name.
For more information about the Melbourne Festival program, including dates, venues and bookings, head to www.festival.melbourne
For a chance to win tickets to Batsheva Dance Company's Last Work, click here.