Melbourne Festival -
Anthony Hamilton: Nyx -
Arts House, Meat Market, 8 October -
Peeping Tom: 32 rue Vandenbranden -
Southbank Theatre, 11 October -
Two works for the Melbourne Festival exist in bleak, inhospitable worlds but their absurdist bents relieve the oppressiveness of their respective settings. Antony Hamilton's Nyx and Peeping Tom's 32 rue Vandenbranden invite us into defamiliarised territories but succeed in drawing us in.
There is a palpable intelligence to Hamilton's work. It enquires, problem-solves, analyses and deconstructs. Hamilton's work also reveals its big picture concerns through a series of micro processes and repetitions.
Nyx, created for the 2015 Melbourne Festival, is unmistakably a Hamilton work. It is strongly ritualistic in feel and synthesises body, voice and percussion. Set in the vast and atmospheric space of the Meat Market, four female figures (Kathleen Lott, Lauren Langlois, Lily Paskas and Rachel Coulson) are reduced to uniform black-clad anonymity; their long pelts of hair obscuring their faces.
The first dance is for voices - seen in the far distance in dim, dusty light, they hum - at first harmoniously as if practising vocal warm-ups but soon veer into discords and then into wails and caterwauls. The bodies respond with “walking dead” twitches and jolts that build into a full-blown cat-fight of shrieks complete with flailing.
This is a work of quirky ritual, where movement appears to be at the behest or instigation of vocal or bodily-percussive imperatives. Artefacts - ceramic pots of various sizes, small squat totemic sculptures and metal objects are arranged and rearranged, their visual patterning playing with the sounds created by the contrasting material, size or resonance of the object.
Through rituals of building, demolishing and reformulation of objects, I read turns of cooperation and discord. The vocal-percussive score and defamiliarised movement language often suggest something animalistic or at least not human.
A chorus of “others” makes stealthy incursions to disrupt or assist the task-based actions of the four central figures. They too are anonymous but of a different tribe. Made up of third year VCA dancers, they were menacing and effective.
32 rue Vandenbranden is another creature altogether. It is at once epic and abject and it creates a world where every nuance of meaning has its physical equivalent. It plays out individual internal narratives that intersect, overlap and diverge. A cast of six dancer-performers are stranded in a wind-swept, snow-bound landscape and in claustrophobic proximity with one another, all set against a huge enveloping sky. They cling to the only certainty they know: the flimsy shelter of two small cabins. It is brutal and funny and masterfully performed.
Threads of narrative seem coherent but subvert sequential reading. Characters are introduced in pairs and embody distinct physical languages. They encumber one another, dominate or submit - it is physical comedy liberally tinged with violence and threat. Before long these initial choreographic tropes dissolve and the dancers move into new and changing modalities, reflecting the fluid inter-relationships of the group. We are left knowing that the harsh environment represented in 32 rue Vandenbranden is not the enemy after all - it's the people.
As the dynamics of the group shift, there are re-pairings, rapprochement and violent clashes. There are interludes of song ranging from arias to love songs to R&B and the stylistic clash is consistent with the lurching and unstable narrative landscape. Each segment works within its own logic but reaches out to make sense as a whole. Sound dramaturgy allows for this free-ranging semi-narrative structure to work.
Peeping Tom is a Belgian physical theatre company whose artists have collaborated along with artistic directors Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier on this work. The performers were quite remarkable and their skills crossed genre from dance to contortion to accomplished singing. The dancing was uniformly compelling while being completely idiosyncratic. This work has had a long development which rather than stultifying its freshness, appears to have strengthened it.
- SUSAN BENDALL
Click on thumbnails for photo credits. Top photo: Nyx, photo: Byron Perry.