Dancenorth and Tasdance: Threefold: Webber/Hill/Huang Yi

Dancenorth and Tasdance: “Threefold: Webber/Hill/Huang Yi” -
Earl Arts Centre, Launceston, 21 August 2014 -

“Threefold” is a historical collaboration by two far-flung regional companies, and the fulfillment of Annie Greig's desire to have Raewyn Hill choreograph for Tasdance. Hill's 2010 appointment as artistic director of Dancenorth created the opportunity and, given both companies' commitment to multi-work programs, made good artistic and business sense. The result is a compelling audience experience. “Threefold” builds from the cool, contemporary manipulation of the fluency of tai chi in Echo, by Taiwanese dancer-techno artist Huang Yi, through the self-mockery and dangerous games that are hallmarks of Gavin Webber's uniquely Australian dance theatre, to the suffering of the human spirit in Hill's A dance for the forgotten.

Workshopped in the cold, hard beauty of the colonial prison and mass murder site at Port Arthur in 2005, and performed two years later at Tasmania's Ten Days on the Island festival, A dance for the forgotten is a threnody for the victims of cruelty at the hands of English colonial gaolers. It also honours the human capacity to endure and protest, repeatedly, even if this leads to renewed brutality. Performed in corridors of brilliant, golden light, A dance is as mesmerising as it it hard to watch, while bodies roll and fly, collapse and recover in continuous spirals until, briefly, figures hurl each other around or clasp each other in despair until exhaustion or stillness prevail. All this begins again eliciting from this viewer at least a silent call to 'Keep going, don't let go!' because to let go would be to invite death or insanity.  A gift to the audience is the way each black-clad dancer illuminates the dance by expressing a unique, emotional resonance to Hill's drama and through the exacting process of inhabiting both the choreography and Eden Mulholland's unsettling distortions of Giovanni Pergolesi's 18th century Marian Vespers.

If Hill's movement resembles the Expressionist torsion and circularity of Sydney's Bodenwieser Ballet (1939-1959), Gavin Webber's In has the capacity to unhinge and reshape the body and still achieve a similar sinuousness. In Webber's program note is a quote from John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, that holds the clues to this generous, droll and happy work: "I don't believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing." And so the dancers take clothes for skin, try them on, pose, then toss them away. They exclude a daggy outsider, until she dresses like them too, or strut around, wackily attacking each other for dominance, for their obvious lack of cool, or, more simply, for acceptance. This is an exuberant, expressionistic work - to wild rock music by Ben Ely - where anger and frustration become truly comedic, and demand extraordinary virtuosity.

Throughout "Threefold" Sarah Fiddaman, Brianna Kell and Timothy Walsh (Tasdance), Alice Hinde, Erynne Mulholland and Andrew Searle (Dancenorth) were just magnificent.  It was disappointing, then, that technical problems masked their mastery of Huang Yi's enjoyable opening work, Echo, a tightly constructed geometrical puzzle of a dance to 186 electronic sounds.

- Lee Christofis