Larissa McGowan: Skeleton -
Adelaide Festival -
AC Arts Main Theatre, Light Square, 3 March -
Larissa McGowan’s Skeleton is her first full-length commission as an independent choreographer and also the only Australian dance work in the 2013 Adelaide Festival of Arts. Having left ADT in 2011 after more than ten years as a dancer and latterly assistant choreographer to Garry Stewart, McGowan has recently been making short works all over the country, from Slack on LINK Dance Company in WA, to Transducer for Tasdance, and Fanatic for Sydney Dance Company’s "Contemporary Women" season (remounted in the current “De Novo” season).
If Skeleton is anything to go by, she’s managed the transition from short piece to full-length work pretty seamlessly. Co-directed by Sam Haren, until recently director of Adelaide’s experimental theatre group, The Border Project, the work is inspired by the sculpture of Australian artist Ricky Swallow. Swallow’s sculptures looks at objects from popular culture, such as Walkmans and BMX bikes, as archeological data. Given this premise, props necessarily play a crucial role in Skeleton, and McGowan has found a prop maker of extraordinary skill in Michelle Delaney, whose white BMX bike, baseball bat, t-shirt and stiletto shoe draw gasps from the audience as they suddenly shatter into pieces at significant moments.
The set by Jonathon Oxlade also contributes greatly to the work’s impact. Two sliding black screens move constantly from side to side across the performance space, allowing the razor-quick substitution of dancers and objects to occur as if by magic. To Jethro Woodward’s industrial score full of shunting noises, arcade game sounds and the occasional movie voice over, the five dancers, including McGowan herself, hurl themselves through some extremely demanding choreography. Stewart’s influence is evident in the movement vocabulary of popping, tumbling and shuddering robotic rigidity, but the intricacies of the arrangement are all McGowan’s. As the screens pass, dancers disappear only to be replaced by others in identical poses; short interludes of movement in which dancers manipulate each other and the various props are brought to an abrupt end by the next pass of the screen.
There are some terrific sequences, such as the duet in which McGowan and Lisa Griffiths dance in jerky unison, and the episode in which Marcus Louend, trying to shed his headphones, shakes his head like a crazed puppy. Griffiths’ lengthy play with the BMX as if it were some incomprehensible object, and her hilarious mimicry of a recorded movie fight scene, are highlights.
The two female dancers, the powerfully compelling McGowan and the fantastically precise Griffiths, are vastly more experienced performers and carried a great deal of the piece, but the relatively junior males—Marcus Louend, Lewis Rankin and Tobiah Booth-Remmers—gave excellent accounts of themselves also.
About half way through though, the piece becomes a little repetitive and seems to lose momentum, and it would benefit from a change of pace or the introduction of more variety in the movement. Nevertheless, it ends particularly strongly as the objects successively shatter or are smashed and the dancers all frantically fall down and get up again to a crescendo of breaking glass sounds.
All in all, this is a strong work from McGowan that augurs well for her choreographic career, and with a bit of tweaking, should travel well.
- Maggie Tonkin
Skeleton plays the Adelaide Festival until 9 March, and Dance Massive (Melbourne) 14-23 March.