• The Dark Chorus. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
    The Dark Chorus. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.
  • Thank You For Coming: Attendance. Photo: Maria Baranova.
    Thank You For Coming: Attendance. Photo: Maria Baranova.
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Melbourne Festival

Faye Driscoll: Thank you for coming: Attendance
North Melbourne Town Hall, 7 October 

Lucy Guerin Inc: The Dark Chorus
Meat Market Arts Centre, 8 October 

This year's Melbourne Festival is not dense with dance works but two that I saw offered great contrast - one a festival of interaction, the other a study in power, domination and influence.

Audiences often dread participatory performance - the word “squirm” often comes to mind. Thank you for coming: Attendance by New York choreographer Faye Driscoll, is a work that boldly declares itself from the start. An entreaty or manifesto in song sets out the contract "We need all of you" and cheerfully acknowledges the potential threat "if you need to go out ..."

The feat in this work is that the nature of participation/audience inclusion, although quite intense, was managed in a way that never felt uncomfortable or confronting. This is because the work is so good-natured and doesn't particularly single out individuals but involves us as a whole.

The work is divided into episodes that move to and fro between dancer-focused sections and a wider choreography of spectator/participants. At first the five dancers form a tightly entangled series of counterbalanced poses, where the adjustment of weight and position affects the whole. Eventually they individually reach beyond their own nucleus to connect to other “cells”, and then on to engaging independently with the whole body of the audience.

As the first section of the work slides into the next, so one of the dancers slides into the lap of an audience member, apparently seeking succour. On the night viewed he then reached to me and I took his hand. With the audience seated on the floor, in the round, dancers rolled slowly in a wave entwining themselves with audience as they go. As the wave progressed and more people were captured into the choreography, there was a degree of evasive butt-scooting evident amongst Friday night’s audience, however, most submitted to the choreographic intervention.

An episode that captivated Friday’s audience involves a ritualistic chanting of audience members' names in a song accompanied by guitar. The movement to this section is extraordinarily compelling. Facial and bodily isolations are both fierce and funny, relatable and absurd. Dancers move in unison and break out into individualised iterations of the movement. The use of names doesn't feel gimmicky but suggests a real attention to the task of communicating with the audience as a group but also as individuals.

A section involving the audience as custodians of props adds to the sense of ordered chaos and the whole work ends perhaps predictably but satisfyingly with the audience being gradually recruited into a simple circle dance. This creates an atmosphere of celebration and consolidates the community that has been created throughout the work.

Driscoll's work serves as a reminder of the place of fun and entertainment in dance and how most of us approach dance in pursuit of joy. I look forward to experiencing the next two instalments of the trilogy "Thank you for coming" and can only say, Thank you for having me!

Lucy Guerin's The Dark Chorus also features five dancers - a wonderful ensemble of Benjamin Hancock, Stephanie Lake, Jessie Oshodi, Lilian Steiner and Tyrone Robinson. They are both part of and separate from the larger, anonymous, robed chorus that menacingly circle the periphery of the performance space throughout.

Resonances of Greek chorus are invoked through whispered narratives, amorphousness and ubiquitous presence of the robed figures in the work. The five dancers play out their individual trials set against this. Broad binaries of light/dark, individual/group, past/present, real/imaginary are both externally and internally absorbed into the texture of the work's thematic material and movement. Literal up/down, out/in movement patterns are recited, often resulting in staccato phrases of fits and starts. The five shed their black victorian gothic style gowns, revealing simple white garb to take turns to come under the scrutiny of the group; sometimes individually, in pairs or as a whole. Meanwhile contrasts between that which is illuminated and that which is cloaked form the central conceit. Far from being simplistic, the use of these oppositions is brutal and harsh but also suggestive of the untold gradation of complex meanings in between.

Vocalisations and fragments of story are incorporated into the work as are series of instructions, demands, urgings. In a long sequence that pushes toward the climax of the work,  a dancer (Benjamin Hancock) is put through a ritual humiliation, performing an escalating series of tasks with a cardboard box. As the demands from his four dominators become more extreme, he is pushed to the point of collapse. New benign urgings wash over him as his capacity for humanity is stripped. Hancock demonstrated his wonderfully boneless fluidity and physical and interpretive range throughout this section.

The lighting design for The Dark Chorus is effective and simple: a large round pool of light reveals the main action in the centre of the space. Sound is suggestive, sometimes relatable and sometimes alienating. This is a complex, interesting and densely textured theatrical experience.

SUSAN BENDALL

Thank You For Coming: Attendance. Photo: Maria Baranova.
Thank You For Coming: Attendance. Photo: Maria Baranova.
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