• Photo: Pippa Samaya
    Photo: Pippa Samaya
  • Photo: Pippa Samaya
    Photo: Pippa Samaya
  • Photo: Pippa Samaya
    Photo: Pippa Samaya
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Chunky Move: LUCID

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Chunky Move: LUCID
Chunky Move studio, 26 May

Anouk van Dijk has been the artistic director of Chunky Move now for just under four years and the work she has made for the company carries a very particular fingerprint. It is both strongly hybrid in form and collaborative. She also exploits the particular qualities and experiences of her performers to give flesh and immediacy to the explorations she enters into. LUCID, van Dijk's newest work, typifies these traits. A duet of dichotomy and symbiosis, the piece gives equal weight to its two performers; dancer Lauren Langlois and actor Stephen Phillips. A third presence - a camera capturing live feed of the two onto a large screen both serves and dominates the two performers as it constructs our experience of the work.

No aspect of LUCID is without mediation. The performers communicate, not so much with each other as with the camera and the images it generates and feeds back to them. They pose, compelled to return time and again, captivated by the story their changing expressions tell. The interestingly designed set has the pair often working behind the screen, visible only partially but with carefully curated footage on the main screen and a smaller monitor giving glimpses into a larger story. Camera angles capture part of a body, distort, enlarge, disorientate. The work questions perception and how we construct ourselves for public view, how images are received and processed and how the camera can betray assumptions based on what we think we see.

Langlois and Phillips rose well to van Dijk's provocations. Langlois is endlessly adaptable and possesses a free and uninhibited approach to performance. She displays frantic athleticism as well as controlled and poised acting when called for. She slides readily from slapstick to pathos and into grotesquery. Phillips moves adeptly but his role is firmly anchored in acting. My bias toward dance makes me wonder why a dancer/actor was not cast - this not detracting from Phillips's performance but opens up the possibility of a more completely danced work. However, it is clearly not van Dijk's intention to make a dance-dominated piece.

LUCID comes amidst a growing number of dance works that deliberately disrupt the live presence of the dancing body with concurrent video captures or other filmic interventions. The co-presence of dancer and image of dancer forces a perception shift and confounds the viewer's attention. This is all well and speaks of the obvious obsession people have with various technologies for representing self in the world, however, it is quickly becoming stale because of the multiple iterations of these techniques. This style of work has almost become a genre in itself. It also acts to amplify the self-consciousness implied in the lurking presence of the camera on stage.

Viewing a work by van Dijk often feels like watching a process of development rather than a resolved performance. This is not to say that it appears incomplete or is unclear in its intention but that the bones of the work seem to be laid bare. This includes revealing the playfulness of process as well as using excursions into the memories and experiences of the performers. I know this is really personal, but I tend not to enjoy the building of scenarios around the performers' experiences and found the sequences around reinterpretations of film scenes that LUCID employs rather heavy. Some of the content reminded me of workshops, auditions and improvisations and felt extraneous.

I always look forward to seeing work from Chunky Move and find van Dijk's countertechnique very dynamic and at its best produces breathtaking choreography. However I am finding it harder to completely enter into the works. The more the work is inward-looking and provides a meta-commentary on itself, the less involving and immediate it becomes and the less necessary I feel as audience.

- SUSAN BENDALL

Lucid plays until 12 June.

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