Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre
Reviewed Thursday 14 May
Slop (2026) is a duet emerging out of a cross-disciplinary collaboration between dance artist Rebecca Jensen and sound artist Aviva Endean. Having previously worked together on Slip (2023), a full-length work for FRAME: Biennial of Dance, in Slop the pair extend their collaborative approach, blending movement and sound strategies in a performance work that is as theatrical as it is conceptual. For Slop, Jensen and Endean eschew the usual separation of choreography and composition by bringing the sound artist into the work as performer and integrating the dancer’s voice and body into the work’s sonic landscape. As such, a muddy symphony that holds new possibilities for cross-disciplinary performance is brought to life. This formal investigation is paralleled with a thematic one: conjuring ideas of the abject and the excessive, Slop’s connotations to AI-generated slop also reference the chaos of a highly digital existence, with the deconstruction of movement and sound strategies generating an intentionally unstable landscape within which to explore the precariousness of truth and reality. Both aspects of the work - the formal experimentation and the cultural critique - were strong, but occasionally the work’s broad spectrum of focuses destabilised its impact.
Whilst the pair’s conceptual concerns and performance-making strategies have evolved since Slip, Slop presents a continuation of some of the former’s visual references. Like Slip, Slop opens to Jensen dressed in medieval garb. Where Slip evoked the dress of a medieval courtlady, Slop is appropriately grubbier in its referencing of a medieval peasant. Endean too is equipped for handling dirt in overalls and gumboots as she blows into a geometrical construction built from toilet pipes. Beneath their feet, a plastic sheet with a futuristic and hyperreal image depicting tyre marks through muddy slop, created by costume and set designer Romanie Harper. This first section can be described as an uncontrollable explosion from all orifices. We watch as Jensen simulates slurps, burps, farts, vomits, squelches, glugs, and chugs, expelling liquids between the various buckets on stage and feigning secretions. These theatrical movements, demonstrating pedestrian actions (but performed with dancerly precision), are exaggerated by Endean’s use of foley, a technique used in film to add sound effects mirroring on-screen footage that was employed in Slip. In Slop, Endean utilises a table covered in various tools, vessels, and materials, manipulating them on stage in sync with Jensen’s movements to create a score of sound effects that accompany choreography. Whilst usually foley works by overlaying separately recorded sounds onto film, seamlessly integrating invisible effects to “create a heightened sense of realism”, in Slop we witness Endean creating the majority of the foley effects in situ, contributing to a shared live performance energy between herself and Jensen. Furthermore, Endean’s foley effects do not necessarily echo the ‘realistic’ sonic associations of Jensen’s movements, instead bordering on and playing with the absurd. This hyperbolic and at times contrasting relationship of sound and movement completely changes our experience of Jensen’s choreography - her movements become capable of producing alternative meanings and challenging what we understand as ‘real’ through sonic exaggeration and opposition. Following this sequence of grotesquerie, Jensen strips off her peasant garb and becomes a pig, resplendent in a pink leotard, fluffy white boots, and a maid’s cap. She snuffles and squeaks and scuffles around the pig stye, revelling in her slop.
Suddenly, two electric guitars drop from the fly tower with an electrical boom, their cords becoming entangled in each other. Jensen and Endean unravel and begin to simulate playing them, whilst a melancholic melody plays over the speakers. Electric guitars are layered symbols of artifice: a reproduction of an origin object whose form derives from imitation rather than pure function: an associative and ornate echo of its analogue parent. As mysterious lyrics emerge from the melody, the performers lip sync in a manner both sincere and self-aware, the ‘fakeness’ of their performance intentionally exposed. However, this conspicuous lying, usually disdained in performance contexts, achieves an honesty through the performer's earnestness: they insist on our attention, whilst barely doing anything. In this poetic atmosphere the pair begin a simple choreography with their guitars, tracking lilting patterns and pared back hop - skip - jump sequences. The imperfect synchronicity of the movements as they lip sync with heartfelt sincerity offers a critique of discipline-specific expertise - if a non-dancer (Endean) and a non-musician (Jensen) can meet somewhere in the middle and create performance, then what is the place of proficiency? Can even skill be simulated?
The last chapter of the work sees the plastic floor dragged backwards and up the back wall to frame the set, highlighting the surreal perspective of the muddy image and conjuring Abstract Expressionist associations. Jensen reemerges in a colourful costume and performs a movement sequence using long braided ropes, simulating the power of a cowboy whipping a lasso. Endean enters and the pair commence an intertwined, rolling and wrestling movement sequence, like pigs in mud. This section is the most physical of the work so far, yet its connection to previously explored concepts, outside of a general ‘messiness’, is insufficiently defined. Whilst finding a moment for animalistic physical freedom is never a bad impulse, this sequence feels anticlimactic as its relationship to the work overall remains unresolved. Despite the fragmentation of this epilogue, the scene’s visual elements of set and costume sustained connection to the work’s more compelling earlier material. Nonetheless, Jensen and Endean’s collaboration for Slop has clearly been, whilst at times messy, fruitful, and deserving of a third iteration.
Slop runs at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre from May 13-23. Tickets available here.
-Belle Beasley