Dance Massive
Mariaa Randall: Divercity
Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 23 March
The Farm: Cockfight
Arts House, Meat Market, 25 March
The second big week of Dance Massive brought us an array of new works by independent choreographers and companies. We saw works that considered gendered perspectives in ways which were powerful, celebratory and absurd.
Impressive was Mariaa Randall's Divercity, which looks at the ways that country is imprinted in the body from an Indigenous women's perspective. Randall uses a number of devices to make the work intimate and involving. Women of the audience are invited into the performance space to learn a series of movements and words that are emblematic of four regions. We perform en-masse, the same sequence of movements and call out words connoting women from the four language groups represented by the creative team. After the male audience joins us, we perform the sequence joyfully as a celebratory opening to the work.
Two female dancers (Henrietta Baird and Waiata Teller) take turns inscribing their country with their bodies to a backdrop of projected details of elements of their country; rock, earth, muted aerial views. The colours and patterns fall over their bodies, creating a dialogue between the two. Their bodies disrupt the landscape just as the landscape imposes itself on the body. The aerial views become increasingly urban. Each speaks phrases and words in their language then come together and words change to English.
The tone of this work is often light and familiar, warm and intimate. There is banter and shared stories. The dance language is as individual as the bodies are. The female chorus rises again to dance and call out language. A final section has the two women pulling up strands of tape to reveal a pattern in the dust-laden floor before simply leaving us with the space, the imprints of country and a wash of colour.
Review continues below...
A world away from Divercity, The Farm's Cockfight is a tight, slick piece of dance theatre that puts aspects of maleness under the microscope. Co-devised by Joshua Thomson and Gavin Webber, it takes the germ of their real-life relationship as a way into exploring facets of male competitiveness. Its physicality is masterful and its comedy biting.
The setting is an old-school office; tatty, basic and uninspiring. Here a whiteboard, filing cabinet, crackly old transistor radio and phone are there to be wrested from the competitor or used as a weapon against them.
In this world is doesn't matter what the two men are fighting for or whether it really matters, but fight they must. So the work gives us glimpses into key battles. They are danced but also verbal. Key themes are age and power and a fight to the death to preserve one's place at the top or challenge the leader. In this work the men are fighting to be the king of nothing.
Performances from Thomson and Webber were exemplary in every aspect. The scripting is very pacy, clever and brutal. The dance is intense and compelling. Slow-motion counterbalances that are ostensibly combative are also exquisitely intimate. There are wonderful layers to the cockfight on display and although comedic and broad in a way we can all relate to, the vulnerability is visible just beneath the surface.
I particularly enjoyed a section where the two men enact a pro wresting contest in slow motion, wearing sheets of A4 paper as masks which they slowly devour. The absurdity is overshadowed by the beauty of the movement and the real intimacy between the bodies.
There are also comical all-out brawls and mind games. The show slams along at a furious pace and culminates with a scene both absurd and transfixing that has the men tethered by their neck ties (old school and upstart). They drag each other about by the neck, slam into desk and filing cabinet. The fight is the only thing that matters in the world of Cockfight. The men are programmed to launch ever escalating attacks.
Divercity and Cockfight represent two works that have gendered themes but which are not at all excluding. The thematic material of Cockfight might seem alienating to women but will be equally recognisable to a female audience.
- SUSAN BENDALL
Pictured top: Joshua Thomson and Gavin Webber in Cockflght. Photo: Kate Holmes.