• Deborah Brown and Leonard Mickelo in 'Terrain'. Photo by Greg Barrett.
    Deborah Brown and Leonard Mickelo in 'Terrain'. Photo by Greg Barrett.
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Playhouse, The Arts Centre,

Melbourne, June 29

 Implicit in the work of Bangarra Dance Theatre is the cultural connection of body to land. We have come to expect earth and elements to be referenced in a very visceral and immediate way and inscribed on and in the bodies of Bangarra's dancers. Terrain, the new work by Frances Rings, fulfills all these high expectations. Indeed this aesthetically mesmerising and engaging performance transcends tribe and skin and even its indigenous lineage to become purely an absorbing and accessible dance work.

Terrain traces the seasons and moods of Lake Eyre in episodes that also mirror moments of Indigenous struggle, identity-making and inheritance. This affords a rich possibility to explore variety in design and lighting as well as inventive choreographic language.

Bright white-gray light splits the stage with a lightening flash. It is replaced by warm low light as a tightly-held group twines and melds into sculptural forms. Any moment could be captured photographically as a strikingly beautiful image. Bodies roll, create spikes of attention, interweave and reform. Kept low to the ground, the movement nevertheless extends and reaches, creating levels of interest and depth. A dancer is held aloft and rolled from shoulder to shoulder.

Ensemble episodes see tribal men in their struggle for land-rights, using symbolic and highly organic shields for protection. Men appear like apparitions, masked by their shields, traces of white dust or salt shedding as they move. Solos allow for a switch of attention and dynamics. A tension is evoked between an introverted protectiveness and a feeling of adversity. A woman pours earth through her hands and crouches, embodying her fragile inheritance.

A woman (Yolande Brown) dances supported by three men as land is passed down. Power and deliberateness are juxtoposed with fragility and lack of agency, especially in the woman's reliance in this section on the male dancers for support and movement. The women are stunning in an episode inspired by the spinifex of the Lake Eyre region, their heads adorned with brittle, sculptural twigs, their costumes shifting from gold to ash-gray. The movement is caught in the cut-outs of their skirts and enhanced by lighting.

The various episodes are punctuated by solos and duets, which refocus attention. Groups become pairs or solos and meld back into one. This is a very organic-feeling work that, while being broken up into discrete mini-narratives, provides a forward-driving movement that makes it all of one piece. Spikey choreography intrudes as a pace changer as a male duet followed by a solo charge the performance. Staccato movements link so rapidly together they become fluid.

Terrain uses striking backdrops combined with transforming but sympathetic lighting. When colour is used as with the bright red design, it stabs the visual horizon. Many of the abstracted black and white backdrops are articulate frames for the movement. The music varies with the moods and remains a part of the coherence of the work.

Whatever rhythms are enacted by the bodies seem organically driven and often resolve in reformulations of root-like entanglements. Where choreography is performed simultaneously it is complementary without always being equivalent. Various spacial relationships are explored.

In the Deluge section, the soft aqueous colours and corresponding echoing, underwater sounds allow a gentleness to emerge that is matched by the shimmering movement of the dancers in their pearlescent costumes.

In Terrain, Frances Rings has made a work that is powerful as well as being entertaining. It is beautiful and complex while remaining very accessible. Its fast pace does not allow for a moment's lapsed attention; something is always happening. This is a work that could easily be viewed repeatedly, and from different positions in the audience, and offer something new each time.

 - SUSAN BENDALL

 

 

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