Meat Market Arts House North Melbourne
Next Wave Festival, May 19
As part of the Next Wave Festival, Aimee Smith's work for two dancers, Wintering, portrays a measured unfolding of the Arctic seasons, both elemental and human. She seeks to physicalise the particularities of the landscape by transposing it onto human bodies.
Wintering invites us into a mostly grey world of half light, shadow and alien sounds. In the opening moments, a figure approaches slowly in the dark and like an apparition mimics walking forward in a kind of slow motion. Rather than progressing, she retreats into the darkness, repeats the endeavour and evaporates into the cavernous space. Falling snow is projected onto each side of the space, both delineating and encompassing it.
Smith evokes in the movement a slow, dream-state by creating a weightless quality. A second dancer appears, dressed identically but with grey and black elements switched. This, combined with the dancer's shadow on the walls, suggests an echo, or double. They move together and apart, each mimicking the body shape of the other, in unison, almost in unison, or as partners gently bearing each other's weight or rolling together. There is a mesmerizing quality here as the movement continues to unfold in its own time. Human and external factors seem to have no power over this pure, crystalline process.
Seasonal changes are registered through sound and a quickening of pace. Bodies are freed to flow and lose their stiltedness. The performance space is pierced by bright, unearthly light - penetrating and exposing. A deep, grinding, churning sound reminiscent of didgeridoo, combined with clear bells above, connote clarity and purity while keeping the feeling very grounded and suggesting an unyielding physical reality. This “season” features dynamic, swirling dance and fluidity. Ice cracks and forms and the “wintering” returns. Limbs yield to the freeze and stiffen.
Wintering reflects environmental and human processes, dichotomies and synergies. The beauty of the landscape is also deathly. Dancers Rhiannon Newton and Jenni Large are controlled and beautiful in their execution of Smith's choreography. The movement is very grounded for much of the work, with articulations from upper arm to fingers in isolation from neck and shoulders, a recurring quality that suggests restraint and limited freedom of movement. Upward reaching gestures seem inhibited and denied in a world that seems to be simultaneously almost without gravity and yet earthbound.
The staging is atmospheric. The large, bare space is effective in suggesting isolation. Sound is also a significant player in this piece. Recordings of the Arctic environment are recognisable enough yet alien enough to generate context. The pulsing, electronic grinding of the long opening live solo performance by Kane Ikin works to create a feeling of sensory deprivation. It is unclear, though, what purpose there is in having the performer visible or why his solo is so extensive. An absence of visual cues might have strengthened the impact of the sound. The length of this work might be criticised by some, given its portrayal of slow, organic processes; however, for me it felt right for time to move at its own pace.
Wintering is a substantial piece of choreography for two dancers to carry and they discharged their task well. As a whole work, the elements combine successfully to convey something of Smith's vision of the upper Arctic Circle as she experienced it as part of an 18-day residency. Smith concentrates on fragments of visual stimuli gathered from her residency. The emotional responses to these gives an intimacy to the performances that contrasts well with the vastness of both the physical and metaphorical landscape she engages with. This is a thoughtful and affecting work for those willing to take the journey. However, it is not a dance work for an audience wanting conventional spectacle. Indeed, for these viewers, it may seem a little monochrome and slow.
- SUSAN BENDALL