State Theatre Centre of WA
Friday October 3, 2014
Independent contemporary choreographer Aimee Smith is a 2004 WA Academy of Arts graduate. Her latest work, Borderline, was devised and created in collaboration with sound designer/musician Ben Taaffe. It is described as "a contemporary dance at the edge of (in)sanity" and the program notes refer to “part animal herd, part protest riot, part rock concert hysteria, and part religious cult . . . revealing a strange world on the verge of collapse - or the brink of rebirth”.
Borderline features eight dancers, on this occasion all WAAPA graduates. The production was funded by grants from several government funding bodies and organisations. The hour-long abstract work is divided into three sections. The first, “Into The Fold”, sees the dancers massed and almost indistinguishable in a dark and ominous red-lit gloom. Act 2, “No Man's Land”, sees garbage and discarded items thrown onto the stage, littering the landscape and creating their own sounds as they fall, bounce or roll before being arrayed over a female, threatening to overwhelm her. Act 3, “Trans Form”, has a male, American-accented voice defining at length the meaning of “Trans Form”, and mouthing constant and deliberately irritating self-improvement platitudes and affirmations as uninhibited and oddly ritualistic dancing begins.
Lighting designer Trent Suidgeest has created visual meaning and theatrical magic in what could have become a nebulous plethora of ideas. Ben Taaffe's complex and impressive recorded sound design (featuring WA band Mental Powers, local drummer Phil Stroud and Beppu) is apposite and intriguing, and includes explosive thumping sounds, melodic instrumental sections, buzzing, crackling, humming, bells and voices. Holly Boynton's costume designs are brilliantly conceived, effectively combining with other creative elements; for example, the Act 1 costume fabrics produce rustling sounds, and her clever, coloured costume embellishments are strikingly illuminated in Act 3.
The dancers - Laura Boynes, Tony Currie, Storm Helmore, Jenni Large, Bernadette Lewis, Tyrone Robinson, Isabella Stone and Ella-Rose Trew - gave fine, committed performances, often moving slowly in groups, occasionally venturing alone from the pack but always returning to the “fold”. Excellent use of the stage space and a choreographic language that includes crawling, shuffling, gyrating, scampering, slithering, bounding, running, shaking and some apparent extemporising sees them mostly on stage together. The dancers' skills are not always fully utilized, but the grouped sections as they move as one are intense and powerful. Their impersonal detachment is necessary but confronting, as are the stamps and howls contributing to the soundscape. Some sequences are very effective but overextended.
Borderline delivers many memorable moments. The Act 1 opening scene, of a pile of darkly clad, hooded figures, their feet and hands just captured in the re-lit beams, is fascinating. In Act 2, the dancers form a mysterious but rather beautiful path of litter and guide the litter-laden female on a processional march. In Act 3, the doof doof thumping sounds suggest a raunchy rock band gig, but the gold, deep indigo and violet lights washing over the stage and cyclorama create sublimity amid the cacophony, and the pathways of light converging and extending into the firmaments are ingenious.
Opportunities for choreographers and creative artists to refine their skills and develop and stage new work are rare. Borderline offers much to admire, particularly in the quality of its design elements, and is a welcome creative collaboration and a propitious artistic endeavour.
- MARGARET MERCER