Force Majeure: Flock

Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast, April 12

Force Majeure’s Flock is performance art in its most positive sense.

It is a treat to see a work that returns much more than it requires of its audience, but which, at the same, time inspires onlookers to engage beyond mere observation.

Commissioned for Festival 2018, the artistic and cultural complement to the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games, this community project was beautiful in its simplicity, yet rich in the myriad of sensory and experiential connections it evoked.

Presented on the Surfers Paradise beach, Flock’s starting point was the striking sight of 40 foil-shrouded figures sculpturally emerging on the powdery sand like a mirage, with the late afternoon light casting an ever-changing backdrop of sky and surf behind them.

What happened, though, when the collective shuffled passed the congregation at the “Giant Sing Along” – a mass-scale beachside karaoke session – was magical. Children flocked to these strange creatures trudging toward the Anzac Memorial, as if they were Pied Pipers, mobbing the young performers.

Despite having limited vision, encased in Michael Hankin’s ingenious costumes, the group of non-professional dancers aged from 16 to 23 (plus one of two local support artists), took it all in their adaptable stride, guided by artistic director Danielle Micich’s live instructions from an elevated overview, and an accompanying soundtrack (both inaudible to the audience). Force Majeure’s four lead artists also provided roving observational assistance.

 The children's irrepressible delight and demonstrative curiosity raised the interactive performance to a novel level of intensity and entertainment; the performers’ sudden, unexpected movements sending kids scattering, sounding gorgeous squeals of fright and happy relief.

Beyond this playful dynamic, Flock offered much to admire and ponder in exploring our relationship with the natural world.
From the relative comfort and distance of the memorial’s tiered concrete platforms, one could take in the full picture of the transitioning array of shapes as they variously unfurled into upright metallic columns, crumpled into rocks, stretched flat on the ground in sheets, folded in half or wriggled like worms.

However, before long I was impelled to join the other adults communing with this intriguing landscape – more than observing the formations and interactions up close, I wanted to feel part of it.

Micich has skilfully mixed movement planes, contrasts of pace and mood, and the alien with the familiar: eventually, one arm emerged from its glittering casing like a branch reaching toward the sun; later a hem lifted to reveal feet and ankles, which then scuttled, hopped and jumped along the beach.

When the performers lined side-by-side across the foreshore and began rippling in canon, what I saw as an impressive mirror of the waves breaking behind them, others – art being in the eye of the beholder – identified this as bowing and applauded.

Then, as I fleetingly pondered whether the concept might have indeed run its course after 45 minutes, the fantastical Flock figures metamorphosed to human form, the youthful performers emerging from their glimmering cocoons as mere mortals, suggesting we are all – or can be – more than we appear to be.

I left hoping Flock’s lovely amalgam of whimsy, beauty and profundity could be shared and enjoyed more widely; happily, Force Majeure is tentatively planning a Sydney remount.

- Olivia Stewart