Antony Hamilton & Alisdair MacIndoe: Meeting –
Arts House, 10 March -
Prue Lang: SPACEPROJECT –
Dancehouse, 10 March -
Chunky Move: Depth of Field –
Malthouse Theatre, 11 March -
Force Majeure: Nothing to Lose –
Malthouse Theatre, 12 March -
Melbourne dance fans are rejoicing that 2015 is a Dance Massive year. We are well and truly immersed in this wonderful biennial festival that is hosted by Melbourne's contemporary and independent dance community with works auspiced by Malthouse, Artshouse and Dancehouse. Here are a few offerings from the first week.
Meeting, a collaborative work by Antony Hamilton and Alisdair MacIndoe, sets the scene with some wonderfully inventive work, revealing the marvellously meticulous and obsessive complementarity between the two artists' practices. Hamilton has been working with a precise grammar of movement for a number of years, where measuring movement and time into micro units, counting and inserting disruptions into repetitive phrases, accumulates to create a riveting experience for the viewer. Macindoe contributes with a brilliant and witty musical robotic - a series of 64 mousetrap-like units each with a pencil component that strikes the floor to produce everything from a dissipated patter to a torrent of drumming sound. Early in the work, the body is foregrounded but the understated robot seems to be the impetus to move and alter rhythmic phrases. As the work progresses, the robot exerts more influence and finally becomes the dancer in the piece.
SPACEPROJECT by Prue Lang featured four terrific dancers - James Batchelor, Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois and Amber McCartney. It explores motion and spatiality and the natural and human worlds with their varied imperatives, but in a way that I found a little alienating. Starting with spoken monologues on post modernity, it feels weighty and bogged down from the beginning. Episodes of dance seem rather inconsequential in providing a way into the ideas voiced at the beginning. A sequence performed in slow motion at the end is excellent but comes too late to rescue the work.
Depth of Field is a showcase piece in the festival and makes literal the term “massive”. Anouk van Dijk's site-specific work sets three dancers against the vast backdrop of the Melbourne cityscape. Performed in the open, in the forecourt between Grant and Sturt streets, it uses the sparse lines and harsh materiality of the environment as an interactive space for body and city to meet.
The three dancers (James Vu Anh Pham, Tara Jade Samaya and Niharika Senapati) slam into the ground in uncompromised collisions with its brutal unyieldingness. Often the dancing occurs in a cloud of rising dust created by their relentless pounding of the ground. Some of the choreographic formations seem to be informed by the angles of the space - the diagonals cut through the gravel-covered ground and the hard edges of the built environment.
All three dancers are remarkable performers and their mastery of van Dijk's decentred countertechnique is always wonderful to watch. However, I found the extreme contrast of scale between body and place challenged my ability to become immersed. As well, choreographed figures from the city, walking, cycling, jogging and walking dogs on the periphery of the space, feel anything but integrated into a Melbourne environment. The dancers also seem displaced. The inclusion of sound that is mediated through headphones provides an extra layer of separation. Depth of Field, as its title might suggest, offers visual and perceptual layers. Interestingly, given the importance of site to the work, it feels very removed from Melbourne.
Force Majeure's Nothing to Lose recasts large dancing bodies and claims a space where fat is interrogated; physically, tangibly and conceptually. Its aim is to "celebrate the fat dancing body". Through a collaboration between Kate Champion, outgoing artistic director of Force Majeure, fat activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater and choreographer, Ghenoa Gela, six dancers reveal facets of the experience of large people with a focus on the immediate physical presence of fat. The body is central in each episode of the work, with dancers flaunting their fat. Stripped to underwear, they prowl the stage, fixing their gaze on audience members, challenging them to maintain eye contact.
Early in the work, standing on plinths, the dancers perform a delicate gestural sequence of phrases. This rolls into a section where members of the audience are invited on stage to feel the bodies of the "works of art". This tactile element shows how strongly the work wants the audience to enter into the experience of the fat body.
Other sections sexualise the body, enjoy the body or make fun of it. However, belly wobbling and bottom wiggling is usually a cue for the audience to laugh whatever the physicality of the performer - but it doesn't become political just because it is performed by dancers of size. Self-objectification is still objectification and I felt that the work strayed into this territory. Nothing To Lose is pacey and aims to change perceptions but could have taken this opportunity to challenge stereotypes further rather than simply expose them.
- SUSAN BENDALL