Trisha Dunn: Finding Centre -
Gasworks Art Park, 14 August -
Gerard Van Dyck: Picnic -
45 Downstairs , 19 August -
Finding Centre is a work that uses multiple approaches to explore a concept. Trisha Dunn's self-devised and performed solo allows plenty of opportunities to engage with her investigation of what it means to find, lose and recover a sense of centre as it traverses notions of physical, emotional and psychological balance. The beginning section of the work is dramatic, still and suspenseful. We see the dancer apparently suspended, lying horizontally on a bed of nothingness. Light creeps in to reveal a cavernous drop beneath her. A combination of gentle yet strong holds, reminiscent of yoga poses, suggest a testing of the relationship between space, body, sureness and peril as she straddles the void. Performing her solo, Dunn invoked a strong yet fluid physicality and arms tended to be soft in contrast with a sure anchoring of the lower torso.
From this beautiful and slightly mysterious opening section the work enters and re-enters notions of balance in a series of contrasting micro narratives. Projection (by Adam Synnott and Jason Lam) is a prominent player in the work and manifests in varied stylistic forms. Two solid light box screens are used effectively. In some sections they show coherent but transient snippets and in others the filmic dance is glitchy, fragmented or pixelated - struggling to hold on to its own integrity before falling away. I assumed that the contrasting digital styles were deliberate though some might read this as an inconsistency.
Light is also used to create shadows and silhouettes and in one section an onscreen time-lapse of Dunn dancing at the water's edge at a beach is contrasted by the enormous silhouette of the real, present Dunn toying with the tiny, twitchy fast-motion version of herself. Dancer-only episodes explore attempts at gaining physical and psychological balance. In one she fights gravity and other resisting forces to negotiate a chair and in another she uses audience participation melded with a kind of bi-polar exploration of extreme emotion.
Finding Centre is an absorbing work in many ways and is expertly executed both choreographically and in its design. My only quibble is that there is far too much material in its multiple representations and a sense that Dunn is unwilling to let go of anything.
Almost opposite to this, Gerard Van Dyck's Picnic is stripped-back, immediate and self-sufficient. Its closing image - a kite tracking ever upward and out of reach seems like an apt metaphor for this work. For me, its impression was transient and its substance ungraspable. The conceit of a picnic; its makeshiftness and impermanence and vulnerability to external forces was a really interesting thing to explore but the links from it to a range of other scenarios and explorations of human relationships and fixed moments of experience did not deliver enough of a coherent thread to make the work satisfying.
Like Dunn, Van Dyck uses audience participation and dialogue together with movement episodes to frame his work. However, where Dunn crafts each element as micro works within a highly coherent framework, there is a lightness to Van Dyck's Picnic that evaporates almost on contact as each scenario comes and goes. There are some interesting staging decisions to note. The performance space was very contracted, making the dancer and audience very intimate but we sat in traditional banked seating and, ironically were not always able to see Van Dyck. We were asked to participate by searching under our seats for elements of the barbecue but removed from the action; not truly invited to the picnic. We wrote love letters to ourselves but this task was never really exploited in terms of feeding meaningfully back into the work.
Van Dyck is an accomplished maker and dancer with a substantial body of work to his credit. His contributions to dance through Kage are particularly significant. In Picnic he collaborates with Marieke Hardy and Alisdair Macindoe and the whole that they produce feels to be less than the potential of the parts. The almost constant scripted dialogue fails to take off and even MacIndoe's score does not compel or drive as so often it does. And perhaps that's what a picnic is; a collection of elements, brought together in a not-quite-right space, making do with what can be found.
- SUSAN BENDALL
Top photo: Gerard Van Dyck in Picnic. Photo: Jeff Busby. Bottom photos: click on thumbnails for photo captions and credits.