Melbourne Festival -
Chunky Move/Melbourne Theatre Company: Complexity Of Belonging -
Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, 9 October -
Dewey Dell: Marzo -
Arts House North Melbourne Town Hall, 10 October -
When dancers work with Chunky Move, they do not simply have choreography made on their bodies but their bodies and histories help write the works they perform. This has created a group of dancers who have become consummate hybrid performers - performers who are able to bring a multidimensional approach to work and are able to make themselves available to a less bounded and atomised style of presentation.
This breadth is clearly revealed in the Chunky Move/MTC dance/theatre production of Complexity of Belonging. This is a collaboration which brings together the choreographic and directorial drive of Chunky Move's Anouk Van Dijk and German playwright and director Falk Richter, with the particularities of the individual performers and their personal biographies.
While this focus on the personal is a strength of the work, it is also a weakness of kinds. The work's investigations are broad and represent a complex web of associations; the identity of individuals, in terms of race, sexuality, isolation and affiliation. In what feels like an escalating and slightly hysterical tendency, the characterisations sometimes fall into self-parody - extreme and slightly monstrous incarnations of what may have started as biographical truth. Although often entertaining, this sometimes seemed self-indulgent and overdone.
Complexity of Belonging's choreographic language resisted ease for the most part. It was combative, angry, frustrated, violent and at times, afflicted. The dancers were utterly committed and riveting to watch. It is in the distinct bodily articulations of each that their individual voices resonate more than in the words they speak. I enjoyed watching the partnering of James Pham and Tara Soh in particular and their specific physicalities and interactive chemistry. Lauren Langlois is always compelling, with her angular, spiky and audacious attack. Her body seems endlessly collapsible and extendable. It seems that she is able to render herself completely available to any choreographic challenge and is a confident actor. In fact her 'What I want in a partner’ rant was a tour de force; a kind of hysterical stand-up routine that pushed the point as far as it could go and just kept pushing. It was interesting to note here how the body became increasingly implicated in the text and revealed the insufficiency of mere words.
The interweaving of spoken text and dance was weighted on the side of the text and although there were some poetic utterances, they got lost amidst so many words. Complexity of Belonging was also surprisingly literal and structurally linear considering the territory it sought to reveal. Use of microphones and projected live feed provided close-ups of individual performers, giving a televisual effect. The set, a wide, low, curved Australian horizon, put a poignant question-mark over what exactly we are looking at when we look at Australia today.
In contrast to Complexity of Belonging, the Dewey Dell production of Marzo is a dance work that incorporates text. An Italian-Japanese collaboration, It uses recorded spoken word in Japanese combined with English surtitles to suggest significant points of meaning without becoming overly insistent. Set on an alien planet, we are invited to see a distillation of emotions presented by beings who are humanoid or biomorphic but distinctly non-human. The time and place is remote as is the specific movement styles of the various incarnations of being, yet all is highly relatable.
Three characters are masked and suited in ways that suggest representations of universal themes or roles, rather than individuated beings. Perhaps they signify anonymity and disguise rather than self-revelation. These humanoid dancers combine sections of slow, almost ritualistic moves with frantic, mechanistic repetitions that are suggestive of stop animation or the stuttering vocabulary of a silent movie. Added to this is a small 'chorus' of three huge white Michelin-Man-like characters who cavort in human style without being human. The articulations of movement - bounces, repetitive jumps and rhythmic steps are absurdly cartoonish and rather delightful - something akin to wind-up mechanical toys or springy computer game animations, not surprising since one of the collaborators is a manga artist.
Marzo is a charming, quirky and quite bold work. It allows itself to follow its own logic and not be bogged down in the particularities of narrative, while remaining highly followable and coherent.
- SUSAN BENDALL