Chunky Move: Next Move: “It Cannot Be Stopped” -
Chunky Move Studios, 19 June -
A contrasting and consistently engaging program, “It Cannot Be Stopped” is a Chunky Move commission as part of its Next Move initiative. Three works were danced and directed by their choreographers. The strength of the programming choice lay in the diversity of the choreographic styles and the very specific interests of the dance-makers represented.
Another great strength of Next Move 2014 was its wonderful use of performance space. Two of the works were staged in one of Chunky's massive studios but were spatially configured to involve the audience in different ways. A work performed outdoors was a marvellous use of site and produced a sense of vast airiness and a very different relationship between the viewer and the dancers.
The highlight of the program for me was Paea Leach's the lines of birds. This site-specific work was made for the covered area beside the Chunky Move studios. Flocking, synchronous formations and tight interactions work together with episodes of dispersal in the movement and relating of the three dancers. Lightness and free-wheeling is replaced by weight, effort and vulnerability in later parts of the work. Sound brings another strong component. The random blowing of leaves in the wind and the wonderfully evocative, gravelly skidding sounds of dancers' feet on the sandy ground sets itself against a live sound score which is played by two performers who are placed amidst the audience. Their presence is also a kind of stable anchoring point in an environment where dancers come into and disappear from view.
Atlanta Eke is an interesting artist. She spans dance, performance and installation art. Fountain is enacted in a landscape of artifacts and progresses in a linear fashion along a kind of continuum. The audience flanks two sides of the space, emphasising its length. It commences with Eke transitioning from being a part of the crowd, casually standing and milling around, to playing her own warm-up person, engaging the audience and positioning the work as a part of an ongoing durational sequence that counts each performance as a separate episode. She then moves through stages of change that may equate with human ageing or the progressive changes that occur in the development of a performance.
I am coming to appreciate the power behind Eke's large operatic gestures. Hers are statements writ large, up close, in your face. The movement language is in big-print. It can seem symbolically over-blown. The aesthetic is deliberately grotesque, well illustrated here by the prominence of the child motif, shown as a kind of alien disco baby - huge prosthetic baby head, massive on Eke's slight frame, destabilising and consuming, convulsing and howling. However, Eke enters an interesting discourse arena and has something to say about gender and the body and about the nature of dance performance and expectations around it. Fountain is immediate and visceral. Its use of textures and fluids draws the audience into another layer of experience. Particularly effective is the use of tall, cylindrical containers of fluid, into which Eke submerges her head and limbs, pausing to allow the distorted images to register with the audience.
Benjamin Hancock's work Princess, takes a very different use of the same space and contains and contracts it rather that allowing himself to range through it. He keeps the viewer at a distance. Revealed on a round podium, Hancock commences a ritualistic, slow-paced series of movements that feature the angular folding of limbs. There is a sense that he is testing the limits of his small sphere. The movement pace quickens and encompasses greater fluidity. Flailing arms and high circular kicks end in swirling collapses to the ground. Hancock has a physicality that is enjoyable to watch. He combines isolations of the arms, neck and head with large, sweeping movements of the legs. There is a sense of everything being held under tight control, even in the moments of abandoned dancing.
"It Cannot Be Stopped" worked very well as a sample of current independent dance and was a well-balanced and highly entertaining mixture of choreographic approaches.
- Susan Bendall