U>N>I>T>E>D
Chunky Move
Sidney Myer Music Bowl
Saturday 1st March, 2025
Presented as part of Melbourne’s Asia TOPA (Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts) festival, Chunky Move’s latest work U>N>I>T>E>D is a collaboration between Artistic Director and choreographer Antony Hamilton and Javanese experimental electronic music group Gabber Modus Operandi that explores cyborgian futures and machine mysticism. Featuring six dance artists, Ashley McLellan, Melissa Pham, David Prakash, Samakshi Sidhu, Robert Alejandro Tinning, and Jayden Wall alongside animatronics from Creative Technology Co,. costumes from Bali-based label Future Loundry, and lighting design from Benjamin Cisterne, U>N>I>T>E>D builds a science fiction world in which robotic forms coalesce with human bodies, bringing artistry to industry and testing the limits of dance in the post-industrial digital age.
As a dance work, U>N>I>T>E>D’s interdisciplinary collaborations make it highly unique and point to an exciting future for dance and technology to come together. The endless formal possibilities of human and machine, combined with otherworldly sound, light, and set created an engaging dance experience as spectacular as it was stylised. These elements also push the work further from the realm of dance and closer to something combining theatre and sci-fi installation. Situated in and framed by the distinct industrial architecture of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, U>N>I>T>E>D’s setting alone was a welcome change from the usual theatre experience. Upon arrival in the open air bandshell, audiences were swallowed by Gabber Modus Operandi’s pre-performance eerie ambience, with one of the musicians sitting atop a metal construct overlooking incomers while lighting sticks of incense. The simultaneous buzz of attendees sandwiching onto metal stadium seating created an atmosphere somewhere between a sports stadium and an underground rave.
The stage space was dissected diagonally by a long metal construction upon which several exoskeleton-esque robotic sculptures were hanging like carcasses. Dancer Ashley McLellan, wearing a machine on her shoulders, opened the work with an ominous anthropomorphic spidery solo before the rest of the troupe entered the dystopian world, engaging in a series of solos, duos, and group sections while manipulating the metal beasts across the space. Emotions were intense, aggressive, and insurgent, conveying a sense of struggle or fight. Movement lent heavily on or was affected by the machines. In order to excavate the full range of machine augmentation to the human body, much of the choreography needed to incorporate moving the machines through space, hooking bodies onto or unhooking from the machines. The shapes created by these interactions were spectacular, unlike anything the human body is capable of creating on its own, but some moments of real physical dancing that a stellar cast such as Chunky Move’s are capable of producing were lost between cumbersome machine manipulations. Though the cast of highly skilled dancers were up to the technical tasks, one couldn’t help but wonder if the trade off between less bodily expression in favour of more machine manipulation represents the ideal commune between earthly forms and machine gods.
U>N>I>T>E>D marks the continuation of Hamilton’s long-term interest in creating dialogue between dance and technology. In 2019, Chunky Move premiered Universal Estate, a world in which ‘retro-futurism meets contemporary nihilism’ with dancers navigating ‘an environment of strange technological objects with no known function.’ Also premiered in 2019 was Hamilton’s Token Armies, a ‘modular performance installation’ using a system of ‘bodies, machine-like sculptures, instruments and garments’ to question how humans use tools and technology. Then in 2022, ‘hybrid party/performance for the end of days’ Yung Lung signified a resolution in tension between man/machine, realising instead a ‘communion between hard tech and babyfaced bodies.’ With U>N>I>T>E>D, Hamilton confirms that the era of speculating about the future is over - the future of dance is here, Hamilton tells us, and it is high-tech.
Amalgamating dance, electronic music and robotic possibilities, U>N>I>T>E>D is a work that extends past earthly realities to imagine a mythic post-industrial world. Energetically driven by Gabber Modus Operandi’s transcendental melange of beats, rhythms, and sounds drawing on Javanese trance-dance, gabber, dangdut koplo, and Chicago footwork, U>N>I>T>E>D experiments with how the magical union of body and sound might translate to the machine. Despite the wieldy nature of the animatronics necessitating movement compromises, the forms and textures produced by their integration were undeniably visually arresting and full of possibility. The challenge of finding the mystic in the machine is one that lies ahead for all of us, and U>N>I>T>E>D lays bare that the journey has only just begun.
Chunky Move’s U>N>I>T>E>D ran from the 27th of February to the 2nd of March, 2025, at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne/Naarm.
- BELLE BEASLEY