REVIEW: Plagiary
PLAGIARY
Arts Centre Melbourne
Reviewed Friday August 30
Plagiary was billed as part of the dance offerings for the second year running of Now or Never, a festival of art, music, technology and ideas, in Melbourne. This year the festival’s theme was ‘Look Through the Image’, provoking audiences to engage with work on a deeper and schematic level.
Plagiary certainly activated the cerebellum, in ways that felt novel and surprising even for a contemporary dance performance. The work was created by multi-award-winning dance technologist and choreographer Alisdair Macindoe together with media artist Sam Mcgilp, who created a unique AI video for every performance.
The premise was a performance for 10 dancers, on stage with live AI generated prompts in their ear pieces; these prompts were displayed on a screen above the stage at Melbourne Art Centre’s intimate Fairfax Studio, while the dancers responded to the stimuli, in casual athletic wear with concentration and an unnerving mixture of self-determination and inevitability.
The piece started even before the official start time, with the dancers on stage, behind a glass screen, stretching and fiddling with costumes on rails nonchalantly as the audience settled.
The prompts varied between cliched and absurd, such as “scrunch your heart continuously” and “dance like an anemone moving like a jellyfish”, and the dancers diligently performed these. We were handed glasses at the beginning which would block the written prompts, but reading the prompts in tandem with the dancing maximized the oddity and, occasionally, hilarity of the experience. If you’ve ever been in a contemporary dance class and experienced strange, poetic expressions for instruction, this would chime with you.
The cognitive load for the piece could have been large, with references to Proust, Foucault and Heidegger suspended in esoteric prose, but the effect was often forced and slightly ridiculous, as we would expect perhaps from AI, which is oddly humbling.
Throughout the show, the cerebral tone was frequently disrupted by absurdity, as the dancers continued to follow randomised abstract movement, guided by the AI prompts, yet there were moments of sublimity, a beautiful curve in one of the dancers’ arms, a lasting exchanged look or hold. Over the course of the performance however, the prompts became jarring and distracting, the desired effect perhaps, but I found myself increasingly uneasy, wanting to escape this hypertechnical metaverse.
The real turning point of the performance was where it shifted into a mock "symposium", as Geoffrey Watson took fellow dancer Rachel Coulson aside to interview her on inspiration and the dance-making process.
The affected calm tone of his delivery, as he read his AI generated symposium announcer prompts, and her stilted and intense responses felt awkward and prescribed, adding to a sense of malaise and “existential despair”, which Watson refers to plaintively.
Meanwhile the dancers continued to follow their earpiece prompts with obscure abandon, seemingly unconscious of an audience, or aesthetic sensibility. The way the dancers unflinchingly perform each prompt is, to use an overused Chat GPT word, “seamless”.
The performance immerses audiences in a discombobulating automised space, which feels at once ancillary to creativity and a distraction from it. The effect is a swirling of questions, can choreography be created by AI and is that a desirable or even authentic event? As a one off provocation, it’s hilarious, and it works, as a deeper engagement, I think it falls short. Plagiary is a creation that thrives on novelty and excels at it, but we know in this turbo-speed internet age, the novelty wears off.
- LEILA LOIS
'Plagiary' was performed from August 28 to 31. It moves to the Sydney Opera House from September 12 to 14.