William Forsythe Company: I Don't Believe in Outer Space, Melbourne Festival

William Forsythe Company: I Don't Believe in Outer Space, Melbourne Festival -
Fairfax Theatre, Arts Centre, 12 October -

In I Don't Believe in Outer Space, William Forsythe creates a world of perfectly controlled chaos. A combination of casual-seeming but highly intricate dance combines with physical theatre, character-driven comedy and a strong spoken component. For me, this was a very entertaining work but it is one that has divided critics into polarised camps of love and fury.

The set is a pared back dark space littered with irregular shaped balls of industrial tape. These 'atoms' or detritus are negotiated, thrown and passed around throughout the performance and woven into the choreography. They act to echo the disparateness of the characters onstage while also emphasising their wholeness or connection. A raucous multi-voiced monologue opens the work and introduces us to a community of characters. A solo dancer and a pair perform in self-contained isolation. Free-wheeling and loose-limbed, an increasing number of dancers take the stage in a lively dance jam-session. While the movement is loose and quirky and individual, closer attention reveals commonalities of movement, coherence and relatedness. The effect is a fun and quite joyous sense of highly orchestrated randomness.

Textual elements of this work are created through iterations of song lyrics. “I Will Survive” figures prominently. While the use of song lyrics as a comic device is not new, (and is often irritating), the choice, repetition and resonance of the lyrics does seem to work here, to some extent, on both a humorous and serious level. The cheesy populism of “I Will Survive” serves as a site for manipulation of meaning through delivery, intonation and exaggeration. The work is a collage of absurdist episodes in which dancers declaim and distort, jumble and finally propel the fragments of these lyrics into the audience.

I Don't Believe in Outer Space juxtaposes the cosmic with the personal, logic with disorder, meaning with chaos. The work often illuminates a clashing confluence of activity. Dancers appear to be on their own track, moving according to individualised laws. There is, however, a real sense that each element of the work catalyses the whole. Each dancer can be seen to be affected by the others and to be charging one another's performance. The effect is invigorating and energising.

Costuming is unassuming and grounds the work in ordinariness as a departure point for the more surreal elements. There is a collision of episodes and characterisations. These are often simultaneous, creating a larger-than-life feeling of overload, urgency and self-conscious eccentricity.

William Forsythe has been accused by some of lacking subtlety and being a consummate showman with questionable substance. However, I find his manipulation of dance and non-dance elements in this work very holistic and I am not too clever or cynical to enjoy his choreographic melange.  It is a constant temptation for writers to comment on what a choreographer doesn't achieve in a work.  This is an interesting intellectual exercise but really misses the point that the maker and not the observer is in charge! This is only one of many pieces made by a prolific choreographer and shows a particular facet of his creative output.

I Don't Believe in Outer Space is essentially a piece of highly skilled dance/hybrid theatre. It gives scope to the dancers as performers, while imposing a movement discipline that reveals their precision.  As a Melbourne Festival inclusion, it feels just about right to this reviewer.

- Susan Bendall