Union Theatre, Melbourne University
Reviewed: November 28
Lucy Guerin Inc has auspiced Pieces, a choreographic season of commissioned new works for 20 years. This year, Melbourne University Arts and Culture has jumped on board to provide a new theatre setting. It brings a group of short pieces produced in a contained timeframe to the public and gives the makers a space to experiment and execute their work.
Works presented this year were from Tra Mi Dinh, Joel Bray and Alisdair Macindoe. These are well known names in the Melbourne dance world – all makers working within their own particular and honed idiom. The pieces are varied in very many ways but each involves two performers on stage, either forming a bonded unit or playing a complementary role.
Dinh’s work was presented first and uses a twinning effect as the two dancers are often locked together with arms or perform closely paired movements. The work, Seven dances for two people, is filled with whimsy and lightness. It is at times quite balletic but travels through some fluently robotic phases and adds sudden glitches of movement.
The dancers, Dinh and Rachel Coulson, first appear in a repeated pattern, moving down stage in a part balletic, part folky step that brings them close to the audience. This gives plenty of time for us to appreciate the really lovely costumes by (fellow dancer) Geoffrey Watson. Dark slip dresses are overlaid with loose, transparent over-smocks. They float and move wonderfully with the bodies. Dinh’s starting point for this work is her fascination with the number seven but the movement and patterning is not literal. Nowhere does the work demand we trace or seek that single number. Seven dances for two people is an extremely appealing work and a great show opener. Dinh is a choreographer to keep watching.
Joel Bray is a celebrated choreographer of Wiradjuri heritage. His work is often biographical with links to his Indigenous and queer identity and, recently, his religious past in Homo Pentecostus. In Swallow, Bray again explores elements of his lived experience as a queer Indigenous man. He takes the emblem of his chosen totem, the Welcome Swallow, and makes a link between it and the sexual act of swallowing semen. The core of the work is deeply sexual but not especially sensual with the emphasis focused marginally on the totem and more on sexual performance. Presumably these two "swallows" are closely linked for Bray, however, their coexistence in this piece seemed a little superficial and forced to me. Again this was a duet – between dancer Bray, almost aggressively naked and determined that the audience not miss an angle or facet of his body, and musician/composer Marco Cher-Gibard, who orchestrates, enables and responds to Bray’s body’s needs via sound as well as physically with instruments which combine with Bray’s body to suggest fellatio and swallowing. The music is quite prominent and veers between different dynamics and it feels unbounded, a little like the totem swallow or the sexual appetite depicted.
Alisdair Macindoe brought his long fascination and experimentation with mechanical, musical "critters" to his piece “OK, bye!” It featured two dancers, Rachel Coulson and Geoffrey Watson – a pair of drummers whose instruments play them. The two, costumed in white head to toe and burdened(?) with drums slung over their shoulders, move in ways that suggest they are dictating the rhythm of their instruments. They carry imposing drum sticks that would certainly do the job, but once they lose their drums the dancers also lose their impetus while the drum kits continue their beats. They are joined by a pair of independent micro drums that happily play themselves. Finally a self-motivated toy piano descends drone-like from above and it is clear that the music does not really need the people. The score is very effective and includes a gentle harp score (composed and played in recording by Macindoe’s mother xanya mamunya), a tattoo of drum sounds and escalations and decrescendos of sound. This work is playful and engaging.
Lucy Guerin Inc continues to prove its genuine investment in new choreography and although the bigger space of The Union Theatre accommodated a larger audience than would previously been possible, this program deserves a wider audience still.
– SUSAN BENDALL