Review: Perth Festival – Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Manifest and Christos Papadopoulos’s Larsen C

Manifest

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, presented by STRUT Dance

Forrest Place, Perth

Reviewed: 18 February 2025

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is no stranger to Perth Festival audiences, but this is the first time that the lauded Moroccan-Belgian choreographer has made a new work in Australia.

Presented by STRUT Dance, Cherkaoui’s Manifest was created for the Festival with 12 independent local dancers, and takes as its starting point the idea that peaceful resistance must be rooted in striving to understand beliefs that differ from one’s own.

The resulting hour-long work is universal in its messaging, yet imbued with a sense of its creation-place, Boorloo/Perth. That’s due to the role of Noongar creative collaborator Ian (Moopa) Wilkes, and the venue, originally a Noongar gathering place, now a CBD mall also used for public protests.

Against a live score (by Alexandre Dai Castaing, Wilkes, Cherkaoui) that interweaves snatches of protest speeches with piano, didgeridoo, clapsticks and vocals that include Wilkes singing in Noongar, Manifest’s choreography depicts images of struggle and resolution, from abstract to near-literal.

An arresting opening duet sets the scene, in which tiny Surekha Krishnan wraps herself around the towering Otto Pye, smothering his face as he valiantly holds a placard.

A chorus of 50-odd volunteers echoes or amplifies key motifs, often elevated by Mark Haslam’s raked stage design. Expertly led by dance artists Claudia Alessi and Matthew Morris, this risky concept proves effective.

There are numerous eye-catching solos in this work. Particularly memorable is Karlia Cook’s pulling, grasping and stamping solo, fuelled – it seems – by her intermittent calls and cries. Near the work’s conclusion, Kai Taberner’s liquid undulations and soft landings feel like a balm.

Group sections are more didactic, in particular one in which dancers and chorus are captured by steel fences. Pressed anxiously against the wires, or draped lifelessly atop them, they bring to mind Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. Dancers become each other’s puppeteers, violently jerking limbs and torsos. As each manipulator becomes the manipulated, perhaps we’re being asked to consider how oppression is perpetuated or our own role in the chain. 

A glorious penultimate scene, in which body percussion becomes increasingly complex and joyful, could be a resolution.

But the final message, delivered by Wilkes in a poem which reminds us of atrocities towards Australia’s First Nations people, holds us all accountable for what happens next.

Manifest was beautifully performed by all dancers on opening night, especially considering that just five weeks ago this potent work didn’t exist. Particularly noteworthy was the fluidity of Tamara Eve Bouman, while Beau Dean Riley Smith’s calm, powerful presence resonated throughout.

That choreography of this magnitude and impact can be created and presented in such a short time is a credit, not just to Cherkaoui, but to his two assistant choreographers Nick Coutsier and Tara Jade Samaya, Wilkes, Alessi, Morris and the dancers.

Larsen C

Christos Papadopoulos

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA

Reviewed: 20 February 2025

Opening three nights later, Larsen C provided a striking contrast to the didacticism of both Manifest and C A R C A Ç A (the other Perth Festival contemporary dance work).

Created by Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos in 2021, Larsen C is named for a vast Antarctic ice-shelf. Although global warming caused a huge section of Larsen C to break away in 2017, this isn't a work about climate change.

Instead, this darkly mesmerising work explores the constant but often imperceptible movement that is characteristic of ice-shelves.

Performed by six dancers, Larsen C opens in near blackout. Clad in oily, gleaming black, the dancers would be almost indistinguishable from the minimalist black set, were it not for Eliza Alexandropoulou’s deft lighting, which creates the impression that each dancer is floating in dense darkness.

Thus isolated, the dancers perform solos or duets that writhe, judder or vibrate, feet constantly shifting back and forth, arms floating in organic perpetual motion. Silence is broken by glacier-like cracking and hissing, and gradually more layers become audible; droning, rumbling. The vibrations permeate our own watching bodies.

Sonic interruptions – cracks and bounces, discordant chords – are reflected in the dancers’ movements. A duet (by compelling pair Sotiria Koutsopetrou and Adonis Vais) is spliced with moments in which their bodies corkscrew or heads oscillate, pendulum-like.

Other changes are incremental, glacial even. Each element seems constant until it isn't, and all six dancers are collected by an ever-intensifying bass rhythm. In an amorphous clump that periodically scatters and reassembles, each dancer has their own repeating groove, alternating between beat-driven isolations and sweeping swathes across the stage.

The tension keeps building, and is finally released when haze fills the stage and auditorium, cut by a single light beaming towards the audience. Heads and torsos submerged in the fog, the dancers create shafts of light that reach over our heads. Against a soundscape of discordant organ chords it feels like we’re caught in some sort of bizarre re-imagining of a Renaissance depiction of heaven. This sense of otherworldliness intensifies when the dancers appear to be floating, sylph-like, in the remaining haze.

While the repetitive, minimalist style of Larsen C is sometimes meditative, the intensity of that repetition over its hour-long duration is challenging. Nonetheless, there is something exhilarating about having one’s tolerance pushed, especially by such a stellar set of dancers.

Larsen C isn’t a crowd-pleaser like C A R C A Ç A and Manifest, but choreographically, visually and sonically, it’s the most innovative of the three.

-  Nina Levy