Queensland University of Technology:
"Dance 12" -
Gardens Theatre, 6 November
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) dance graduation season returned to its familiar format this year with all three years of the degree course performing in the program. This offers a welcome opportunity for talent spotting among the younger students and a chance to follow them in subsequent years.
The graduating class of 2012 is only four strong, an unusually small cohort, and they opened the program with Grant McLay’s Conversations in Movement, to music by Zoe Keating.
McLay makes a literal interpretation of the concept of body language, considering the idea of one body part being able to ‘talk’ to another. What would the conversations be and what stories told?
In a promising start, a single spot tightly focuses on the articulate intersection of the hands, arms and feet of a seated dancer. The movement gradually expands, engaging the other three dancers in a vocabulary that is contained and grounded with considerable contact between dancers.
However, the work fails to develop further, or to showcase the graduating students well. This is, in no small part, because the stage is often under lit, which with the dark costuming, makes it near impossible to discern any detail.
The third years also feature in Memorandum, along with the second year students. Choreographed by Expressions Dance Company’s (EDC) Elise May and Samantha Mitchell in a development of its premiere in June, Memorandum offers a better chance for these dancers to extend themselves in duet and trio work.
Beginning with a seething mass of bodies lined across the back of the stage, the movement reveals strong elements of fall and recovery, the dancers moving on and off the stage, grouping and regrouping in different formations. Again however, much of the dancers’ work is obfuscated by a dimly lit stage, and costuming of dark coloured shirts, pants and ‘shift’ dresses.
Gareth Belling’s Something Said, is a development of Say Something, which was shown at EDC’s LaunchPad 2012 and explored the “simple idea of saying what you mean and meaning what you say.” To a lush orchestral score by Max Richter this work challenges the second year students with its continuum of broad sweeping movements that travel across the stage, sudden and brief moments of complete stillness and strong use of the upper body and arms. It is a strong performance from the group, while breakaway solos give several dancers a chance to show individual potential.
Unusually, the first year students perform the final work of the program, Keith Hawley’s High Heels in Bananas. Blatantly theatrical, to music of Michael Jackson and with more than a passing nod to Bob Fosse, this work takes off with the entrance of the sinuous, shirtless Charles Ball (the only male student in the year).
Hawley throws everything at it – back projections, flying screens, chairs, trailing oriental fans – unashamedly without any conceptual underpinning. The female dancers, dressed in dark halter neck pantsuits and heels with hair in single waist length plaits, conquer much of the intricate demands of the Fosse style, and show plenty of the requisite ‘attitude’.
There are moments where the dancers lack synchronicity and the work could be pruned a little, but nevertheless ‘Bananas is engaging with its energy and sense of fun – undoubtedly a crowd pleaser and buoyant end to the program.
– DENISE RICHARDSON
Photo: FenLan Chuang