Victorian College of the Arts
BUILDING MOMENTUM
Victorian College of the Arts
November, 2010, Melbourne
THE VICTORIAN College of the Arts should be very proud of its graduate productions. The standard of dancing is consistently high, the occasion attracts some of the city’s finest choreographers, and the production students come up with some stunning work. This student affair is one of the freshest and most exciting highlights of Melbourne’s dance calendar.
This year’s program had a treasure-hunt feel, as the audience was split into two for the first half and led by ushers to their performance space. You began with either Lina Limosani’s The Phantasm or Helen Herbertson’s Bespoke (tailor-made).
Limosani’s all-girl piece made exuberant use of a vocabulary based on schlock horror – all galvanized twitchings, unmaskings, Mandrake the Magician-style conjurings and zombie slumps. There were elements of butoh and even classical ballet (at one point, there was a moment that evoked an undead version of the famous La Bayadere corps de ballet line). Special mention should be made of the costumes by Ruby Langton-Batty, a final-year production student – brilliantly realised concoctions with abbreviated crinolines that gestured at Victorian melodrama, and chiffon cunningly bunched along the arms to look like skeleton bones.
Among the dancers, Jordine Cornish stood out with a witty, full-tilt, nimble performance. It was no surprise, later in the evening, to see her awarded the Dr Peter Law Travelling Scholarship.
The mood changed as the audience was led for the next piece into a circle of seats, dimly lit. Eventually, the dancers rose from their seats among the viewers and took the stage. This device sharpened the eye to body language: when the dancers subsided back into the audience, you couldn’t help looking at the people on either side of them, as if they too were offered for your eye, and noticing their movements. A gentle tension resulted.
Herbertson’s piece was enigmatic, beautifully set to silence and quietly emotional lieder-style music. The dancers, dressed in muted but meterosexy street clothes, moved between neurotic movement (forcing their own hands down, examining their own fingers, picking at the floor – at times it was like watching an OCD cabaret), awkward couple dynamics of the kind seen in clubs and beds, and private moments of ecstacy and catharsis. Occasionally, one of the dancers would leave the circle, appear in a circle of light, and erupt into anguished frenzy. When finished, they’d finickingly click off the light. It evoked the culture of therapy and all kinds of regulated, scheduled release.
The program finished on a high with Anna Smith’s Ballast. Smith works confidently with large groups, moving them in knots and ebbs across the stage, setting up her trademark columns that fragment and collapse, leaving a lonely individual. The feeling, assisted by yearning cello music and (incredibly unflattering) harem-panted costumes by grad student Ani McCord, was rich and vaguely Eastern. The dancers worked seamlessly as an ensemble, performing complicated floor work and intricate hand and foot placements with aplomb: this group had an obvious rapport.
It’s heartening to see VCA turning out such quality productions in this climate of tertiary mediocrity. Long may it prosper.
– ROSE MULREADY