MoveMe Festival 2016
Strut Dance: Decadance, 16 & 17 September
Co3: The Cry, 16 & 17 Sepember
Praxis: Dark Matter, 17 September
State Theatre Centre of WA
Four days of crowded theatre foyers marked the 2016 MoveMe Festival in Perth. A collaboration between Ausdance WA, CO3, Performing Lines WA, Strut Dance and Praxis, the festival featured three headlining works - Decadance, The Cry and Dark Matter.
Decadance, presented by STRUT Dance was deeply joyous in its presentation. The 16 Australian dancers were selected from a three-year workshop program established by director Paul Selwyn Norton to connect dancers directly with choreographer Ohad Naharin’s vision and physical language of Gaga. The virtuosic ensemble included the experienced Natalie Allen, Jack Ziesling and Yilin Kong alongside a majority of emerging artists who all revelled in earnest and endearingly irreverent performances. Having seen Batsheva Dance Company perform the work at the 2014 Perth International Arts Festival, these STRUT dancers did an exemplary job, no doubt due to the coaching of visiting artists Rachel Osborne and Guy Shomroni. Decadance itself is a reconstruction of excerpts drawn from Naharin’s Batsheva repertoire and is marked by masterful transitions, a faultless structure and arguably the most human of movement languages. Unashamedly entertaining, the audience response was peppered with cheers and ovation.
Invited into a world of syncopated skill like a love child of Charlie Chaplin, ballet and booty, the genius in Decadance is that it demands unforgiving unison while expecting equally that the dancer visibly remains him/herself. A sound score that moves deftly from nightclub to old time movie to prayer evokes nostalgic connection to both pop and ideological culture, most poignantly vocalised in the ecstatic semi-circle chair sequence, "Echad Mi Yodea". The tender exchange with the audience members who joined the cast on stage was uplifting and evidence of a community ready and willing to be moved.
With dancers expert at embodying the unspoken and giving form to feeling, this premise is quite literally developed in Raewyn Hill’s The Cry. This first full-length work by Co3 sees each performer inhabiting a particular emotional state, which was, for the most part, deftly danced with an understated sensitivity that belied their years. The work opens with two figures in black, who trigger and oversee the unfolding of feeling in the rest of the cast. Musician and former dancer Eden Mulholland creates a cinematic wall of sound live on stage with piano and roaming guitar – think the National and Nick Cave – in a performance that could be further integrated with the dance. With design also by Hill, the dancers are layered in muted earthy shades and towered by a striking backdrop of corrugated iron beautifully lit by Mark Howett. Hill’s signature sinewy, low-to-the-ground lunges and seamlessly undulating choreography is evidence of time taken in development and the value of a core group of company dancers. A stand out performance by Talitha Maslin undercut the continuum of repetitious phrasing with her embodied imagination and effortless virtuosity. Zachary Lopez also held the gaze with his astutely subtle rendering of ‘broken.’
A disturbing undertone was driven by Mitch Harvey whose character was the embodiment of ‘anger’ with a mandate to unsettle the others to varying degrees. His role was most disquieting in the attack of powerful dancer Katherine Gurr who, in the challenging role of ‘stoic’, both held the weight of the world and stayed determinedly on top of it. At one point she literally carried dancers one by one, at another ran headfirst into the much larger Harvey in a sequence of returning rugby tackles both defiant and tragic in its repetition. Despite an unfortunately iconic and tired image of man pulling a woman by her hair, this particular relationship was otherwise handled with boldness and quiet despair. This premiere of The Cry revealed a calmly assured performance in a densely immersive hour of danced emotional ground.
Dark Matter, the third of the headlining MoveMe productions, is an ambitious and at times disjointed multi art-form encounter created by PRAXIS, an independent collective made up of Laura Boynes, choreographer, Alexander Boynes, visual/installation artist and Tristen Parr, cellist/sound designer and composer. Transparent frame-like structures double as both moving projection screens and holding pens for travellers navigating their way through a difficult terrain of ankle deep rice. Performers in white, appear as amorphous beings dissolving in and out of groupings to always arrive alone inside an arduous journey raising questions of dislocation and adaption. A highlight was a duet of sound featuring Parr on cello and performer Isabella Stone exquisitely traversing the rice underfoot. Dancers ploughing pathways, scooping up and spinning on unstable ground contrast with the mostly synthetic projected visuals but when stray dogs appear on screen, ideas of dark predatory wastelands and a dystopian future unite. A huge collaborative feat, PRAXIS held their own in the MoveMe mix and provided a vital and powerfully political voice.
These three fully produced dance works and the accompanying vibrant groundswell of audiences marked the resounding success of the MoveMe Festival.
Jo Pollitt