Balletlab - AMPLIFICATION

Balletlab
AMPLIFICATION
CUB Malthouse, Merlyn Theatre
March

“What’s he like?” A bodiless voice enquires, part of Amplification’s bizarre soundtrack.

“He’s kind of freaky.”

And he is, indeed. Choreographer/artistic director Phillip Adams spent time in emergency departments, rehabilitation wards and morgues while researching Amplification – a contemporary work that deals with the 1.6 seconds of mental disassociation between the realisation and impending physical impact of a car crash.

Resurrected for the Melbourne Dance Massive festival, Amplification is as shocking, intriguing, repulsive, aurally punishing and voyeuristically appealing as ever. Tellingly, the ensemble work premiered in 1999, and explores fin de siecle themes of turmoil, change and decadence; the body in turmoil, death and mortality as altered states of existence, and the decadence inherent in loss of control and letting oneself be seduced; either by death or by another person.

The piece opens with two couples sprawled on the dark stage. A frenetic and violent pas de deux ensues, pushing, pulling and manipulating bodies at a terrifyingly high speed. Adams’s choreography is complicated, precise and executed at breakneck pace, and has clearly been rehearsed ad nauseam as not a hand, foot, knee or elbow collides.

 The performers are dressed in faded black tracksuits, with uniformly loose brown hair. All are of similar heights. Their faces are expressionless, blank canvases, identical to each other. These are bodies stripped of identity; as in trauma and death, we are indistinguishable.

Most of the work happens with at least one performer naked. However, for an audience desensitised to nudity, the music is the most shocking thing of all. Loud, abrasive, serrating, almost industrial noises are thrashed out by DJ Lynton Carr (visible onstage). This segues into sexually charged, seductive beats, occasionally with an injection of blues, before abruptly crashing back to thumps, screeches, sirens and weirdly fragmented voiceovers, then back again.

The atmospheric lighting (by Bluebottle) echoes the music; the starkly white stage is variously floodlit, crimson tinged, lit with sinister flickering neons, or gently lit with warm spotlights that almost caress the performers’ nude bodies. 

The pas de quatre is a standout, the four bodies moving in perfect canons, like some sort of sea anemone, pushing, pulling and slapping its tendrils in undulating waves, the performers gaining and then surrendering dominance over each other, again and again. This leads to the foursome breaking into pairs, slowly forcing each other into black face masks, held tight at the back of the neck in mimicked erotic asphyxiation.

The ritualistic swaddling of naked bodies is a lengthy, yet hypnotic, sequence; the performers tenderly tucking, untucking and re-tucking orange sheets around the two bodies carried onstage. The scene echoes the decadence of wallowing in extended grief, busying oneself with these loving but showy tasks, indulged in over and over.

Some sections are very lengthy and without much dancing; yet they aren’t tedious. In a particularly long sequence, two performers are bound with audio tape slowly pulled from their own mouths. The sequence goes on and on, yet it is absolutely mesmerizing to watch. It’s a welcome relief from the frenzied movement and sound of moments before.

The work ends with all of the performers naked in a huddle on the stage, a dehumanised image we’ve seen a thousand times before in footage of the Holocaust; bodies stripped of their identity in trauma, they become blank canvases, identical to one another. One female remains clothed and standing; slowly, she undresses, conforming. She tenderly and lovingly inserts herself in with the other naked forms, draping herself in their limbs. It is a chilling culmination to a brutal, yet absolutely engaging work.

– ASTRID LAWTON