Review: CO3's 'Gloria'
Heath Ledger Theatre, WA State Theatre Centre
Sept 14-18
Gloria by New Zealand choreographer Douglas Wright is a joyous, energetic work performed by dancers dressed in diaphanous golden Grecian costume and bathed in an equally warm glow (a simple but effective lighting design from Mark Haslam and costumes by Alison James). Apart from a central anguished male duet (more on this later), Gloria is consistently uplifting, offered by dancers who beam at us throughout, as they leap, bounce and then rock back and forth, legs apart, palms held horizontal, and then bend down towards the floor and unfold back up. Gloria is staged here with the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra and the St Georges Consort performing Vivaldi’s uplifting Baroque choral work in praise of God. This, together with the enthusiastic choreography (dancer Alex Kay is particularly jubilant and expressive throughout) makes Gloria a sunny celebration of the vital life force contained in the living body.
CO3 artistic director Raewyn Hill decided the time was right to revive Gloria, even though it dates from 1990. Despite its age, it is impossible not to relish the piece. The choreography is never showy nor particularly intricate. Crisscrossing figures are generally replaced by briefly static tableau with the body presented outwards to the audience, the dancers arranged in rows, sometimes kneeling. Its relative simplicity however conceals a restless, continuous drive. There is for example an extended section where pairs of dancers are literally swung and flung about like batons or human hammocks. Energies ebb and flow, but the dance never stops. Like life, it keeps pulsing with considerable power throughout.
It was however a slightly dated work even at its premiere. The basic choreographic palette borrows directly from foundational dancemakers such as Martha Graham (the focus on an expansion in and out of the chest, and which forms the core of the central repeated motif of Gloria described above), Vaslav Nijinsky (diagonally crossing, and faun like leaps) and even Isadora Duncan (in terms of the evocation of a bucolic world of Greek choral dancing and the use of dancers linked up in a circle to express unity). Harold Cazneaux’s famous 1920s photographs of euthymic dancers posed outdoors in the hinterlands of Sydney (https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/99.1975/) could practically be lifted from Gloria.
The mastery of Gloria then is less that it was particularly original at the time of its creation, but in the way Wright skilfully distils and combines a sort of greatest hits of 20th century modern dance. This is a portrait of the joyous, expressive body writ large, a reminder that modern dance arose out of the sports and physical hygiene movement as a means to revivify a stressed urban population. The choreography does however require the audience to leave cynicism at the door. The hoary old motif of having a lone dancer raised up by others as she walks across the upheld palms of her peers always reminds me of undergraduate dance classes and eisteddfods. It also feels a little old hat to have rondels of happy dancers holding hands given such concepts were so thoroughly explored in interwar German dance and for that matter in Deborah Hay’s Ten Circle Dances (1970), O, O (2006) and other works. I am nevertheless the first to concede that such a response is slightly churlish. If you take Gloria for what it offers, it is fabulously upbeat.
One central male duet in Gloria departs from these patterns though. While still articulated by using a Graham-esque form, with breath and emotion sighing in and out of strong contractions and expansions in the chest, this section is more anguished than the rest of the choreography. Dancer Scott Galbraith is rendered almost tiny by his pairing with Sean MacDonald, from whose tall, statuesque form Galbraith clings, hangs and curls around. MacDonald both cradles and reaches out past Galbraith. It is a tussle of bodies and ambivalent affections.
Although barely mentioned in the program notes or media release, Gloria was originally choreographed in memory of Deirdre Mummery, a friend of Wright’s who had died in a drug overdose. Wright, a queer man and former drug user, had been diagnosed as HIV positive in 1989, and although he was to die of cancer in 2018, AIDS took its toll. He once described himself as a ghost who was haunting his own life and body (https://gaycitynews.com/a-choreographers-life-warts-and-all/). Gloria is therefore often been read as a semi-autobiographical eulogy for Wright and others struck down by the earlier global epidemic of HIV (https://www.metromag.co.nz/arts/arts-theatre/15-reasons-to-go-to-wellington). The final pose in the duet shows MacDonald carrying a limp Galbraith looking very much like typical depictions of the pieta, or the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ, a literally iconic image of pitiful suffering.
This inflects the overall performance significantly. Interpreted in light of this, Gloria on the one hand seems the perfect post-Covid production, an act of mourning which nevertheless reinforces life and corporeal pleasure. In the same way that modern dance was offered as a healing panacea for populations after WWI and then WWII, so Gloria presents a way of being in, and celebrating, a body which powerfully rejects any lingering weakness or debilitation left by HIV and Covid. This leaves the fundamentally queer nature of Gloria’s choreography “hidden in plain sight” (as Melbourne choreographer Phillip Adams put it in his recent doctoral thesis). Gloria concludes with the lights going down on a beautiful heterosexual duet to reveal a naked foetal figure suspended upside down high at the back of theatre, as if about to slip out of the womb and into the world. I myself would have liked the queer subtext foregrounded more, and the ghostly disappearance of Wright into his own body suggests that dance perhaps does not truly possess the revivifying power which Wright and the modernists ascribed to it. I was nevertheless, like the rest of the enthusiastic opening night audience, thrilled and invigorated by watching this piece.
– JONATHAN W. MARSHALL
Assoc. Prof. Jonathan W. Marshall is a freelance arts critic.
All photos are by Shotweiler Photography.
