Dance Massive -
Vicki Van Hout: Long Grass -
Artshouse, Meat Market, 14 March -
Victoria Chiu: Do You Speak Chinese? -
Tower Theatre, Malthouse, 18 March 18 -
Lucy Guerin Inc, Motion Picture -
Artshouse, Melbourne Town Hall, 20 March -
One of the real stand outs of Dance Massive was Vicky Van Hout's Long Grass. Premiered at the Sydney Festival in January, this was a visually stunning production that gripped from beginning to end.
Based on the circumstances of homeless indigenous Australians, living "long grass" in Darwin, the work is situational; moving from episode to episode but charting the experiences of the characters as the wet season approaches to wash out their camp. A set featuring tall stands of reeds provides fixed points around which the action takes place. Movement is facilitated via the device of a woven screen that serves as a bed, a shelter and a projection flat. This is incredibly effective, suggesting as it does, impermanence and fragile shelter but also something tangible in a fluid environment. It is woven in situ, stepped through, deconstructed, reconstructed and moved around the stage.
The dance and acting are compelling and beautiful even as they represent challenging subject-matter - deprivation, abuse and addiction but also the choice to live differently. The movement language is strong and self-determined, filled with power and agency and moves swiftly. There is a great sense of counterpoint between the absoluteness of place set against the notion of homelessness and displacement.
Lighting works wonderfully to reveal and obscure, and sound design features grabs of language; glimpses of meaning. I think that this work has a really extensive appeal and should be shown as widely as possible.
A different cultural investigation unfolds through Victoria Chiu's Do you Speak Chinese? In it I found some fantastically exciting physical language. Each section brings with an investigation of a new way of approaching spatiality. It is also an invention of a new and alien language - a defamiliarised body investigating ways it can be, within a constrained space. The performance space is also interesting - a long and narrow gallery reached by flights of steep stairs, with a bank of seating along one length.
The performance starts with a pair of feet, then legs appearing in the dim doorway, feeling their way blindly and tentatively along the ground. The body propels its way into the space - an inverted spider - elbows and knees to ceiling, head forced back, arms overhead with palms pressed to the ground revealing only throat. Hands and head grope along the wall and floor, shifts in body weight are tried. A parallel body makes a similar journey to work separately but in echo of the first.
To the poetry of the body, artifactual elements are added - large sheets of white pliable card are folded into triangular hats that sit huge over the heads of the dancers - creating comical engulfing 'coolie' hats that overwhelm the present body. Later, tubular red garments constrain the dancers who struggle against their confines and remake them in several iterations, finally mastering them into something they can move in. In a final section, a long white mat is rolled out and, initially almost imperceptibly, drips of black liquid drop from above, finally staining the dancers. The liquid first hits the heart and then spreads outwards as it glances off its target and dilutes through the fabric of the dancers’ tops, writing its own language on the body.
Sound and music include spoken word - voices learning and repeating Chinese words and expressions, the live playing of a plucked string instrument by Mindy Meng Wang who is dressed in a traditional flowing red dress - a contrast with the dancers' confining garment.
There is too much in this work to unpack in a short review, with its almost complete absence of pedestrian movement, and its dense and extraordinary physical poetry.
In a completely different mood, but one that is equally anchored in modes of cultural expression, is Lucy Guerin's Motion Picture. The dance unspools in the presence of the entire noir feature film D.O.A., which is projected behind the audience. I questioned the need for it all to be there in the final production - once the material generated transplanted it - and yet it anchored the piece in being a constant reference point of what the dancers were playing to. It would be interesting to know how the playing of the film changed the performers' experience of dancing.
Very beautiful and complex physical language develops from jerky parallels of the movie action to its own absorbing narrative. Duets and solos are particularly striking in their often angular aesthetic. The comicality inherent in the premise of 'playing a film' is turned upside down as the dance starts to own the movie rather than being determined by it. And this transformation is such a feat when the dialogue of the movie is the work's most persistent presence.
- Susan Bendall