ENTITY, Sydney Theatre
FOOD CHAIN, Seymour Centre
January
MERCE Cunningham loved zoos. On his last visit to Australia he admired the elevation of the kangaroos at the Melbourne Zoo and once made a solo for himself based on his study of the animals at San Diego zoo.
David Bintley has a soft spot for animals too, with his Still Life at the Penguin Café highlighting the plight of threatened species.
But the pairing of dance with animals is relatively rare on the stage if one puts aside such curiosities as the dancing bear in Petrouchka. So it was all the more interesting to see an animal connection in two Sydney Festival dance works – the grainy film of a greyhound in Wayne McGregor’s Entity and the tragi-comedy of two lumbering bears in Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood’s Food Chain.
In Entity, the opening and closing image of the greyhound racing ever onward signifies “motion that is perpetual, athletic, striding for something just out of reach”, in the words of McGregor. As he told a Q&A festival event, human bodies, too, “strive to go out of reach”.
Well, they certainly did in Entity, a 60-minute marathon in which 10 performers bound ahead like racing animals, while rotating, crawling, shaking, lunging, nudging, twitching and isolating every visible part of their bodies in one of the most exhilarating dance works we’re likely to see this year.
For the first 20 minutes, the dancers wearing black briefs and white singlet tops could be specimens within a protective space, moving within the confines of three panelled, horizontal barriers that resemble the working part of front end loaders. When the separate panels are lit in a wash of light in cream, gold, pale pink or jade, they could also be membranes over bone.
Entity is split into two, the first half hour danced to five pieces for a string quartet composed by Joby Talbot and the second to an electronic score by Jon Hopkins.
As the one half gives way to the other, the male dancers manipulate the mechanism that lifts the barriers upwards, then strip off their tops as if to remove their skin and fly free.
The women, now in black bra tops, writhe like sea creatures on the floor as the barriers become screens for projected images of primitive life, mathematical formulae and flying birds.
Within the creative team of Talbot, Hopkins, Lucy Carter (lighting designer), Ravi Deepres (video artist), and Patrick Burnier (set and costume designer), McGregor, is, of course, first among equals for his ideas about the evolution of the body and what he calls “the technology of the body” are what drive the work and inspire the others.
The stop motion photography of the greyhound, taken by the Victorian-era Englishman Eadweard Muybridge and made into a film, is the starting point for the choreography. But the continuing theme is the idea of perpetual motion and the understanding that life itself is motion, not only voluntary but also involuntary, such as blood coursing through our veins.
In Entity, the theme is expressed through isolations, dislocations, scissor-like leg movement and extreme off-centre extensions, all executed by taut and tensed bodies until they momentarily lie down, or glance or kiss another’s hand.
McGregor uses the language of ballet as his structure then distorts it. A dancer is swept from the long line of an arabesque penchée into an upside down lift in which her legs are bent like a frogs, her feet flexed. A retire position rotates inwards, ankles buckle and fingers flick from stretched to scrunched. Throughout, ballet’s upright line gives way to protruding rib cages and arched backs.
In the second part of Entity, the floor becomes a field for projected geometric shapes that reflect McGregor’s interest in the “golden mean” – also known as “the divine proportion” – a mathematical ratio found in nature and applied to art and architecture from ancient times. Here, he applies it to the floor patterns made by the dancers. No need to know any of this esoteria to enjoy McGregor’s work and the astonishing ability (and stamina) of the dancers in his company, Random Dance.
Food Chain is a dance theatre piece for six performers that explores “animality, sex, voyeurism, performance and power” in the words of the collaborators, Webber and Millwood.
Set in a cartoonish forest dotted with stuffed animals, it opens with two large and, at first, rather lovable bears (performers in furry suits) spying on a couple on a camping holiday. Who has the upper hand? No surprise that in a world where animal species are becoming extinct at a frightening rate, the usual roles are reversed. The bears threaten the humans and lure them from their hiding places with a pram in which they’ve placed a recording of a baby crying. Among a number of vignettes, the campers’ tent becomes the backdrop for romantic shadow (fore) play, all nuzzling and tongues, before a woman places the head of a bear costume over her own head, then manipulates it around her body as if she and the beast are locked in an erotic embrace.
The large tree that dominates the stage is a refuge and escape route for both humans and animals, and, at the end, a symbol of the tree of life.
Food Chain was commissioned and first performed in Germany, and shows the influences of Pina Bausch and Sasha Waltz, particularly Waltz, with whom Millwood has worked. It is whimsical, sometimes grotesque, sometimes disconnected in its narrative, but overall, it engages the audience and makes its points with visual charm.
– VALERIE LAWSON