Review: STOMPIN and SECOND ECHO
THE BRIDGE
Second Echo Ensemble (SEE)
Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania,
September 8 with further performances and Gallery Activations in following weeks
Entering a black box gallery, an assistant calmly gathers and grounds the audience. This preparation is important. The Bridge is short fast and loud, and you need to be ready for it. There is also some preparation needed for some of the audience with the option to lie supine on a bench and view the piece backwards through a mirror. Others stand.
Luke John Campbell is cited as the performer; however, he is at least partly obscured for the whole work. A mysterious figure moves across the space in front of the floor to ceiling screen. What appears to be ceremonial items are placed or dropped along the way. A large abalone shell conceals the face when addressing the audience before disappearing.
White clouds on the curved screen make way for the projection of a white body mass against a dark background. It expands and slowly transforms while angelic voices are layered with sounds of strain. Through howling sounds, the image breaks up into geometric shapes. Animal-like and breathy, the gruff growls and guttural barks accompany the growing image. There is a lot of technology evident here including the use of a motion capture suit, allowing the digital wizardry of Jason James, Alex Moss to assist the large projected crystal structures to simultaneously scatter and form as a recognisable body. Campbell is free of his bodily constraints. The metamorphosis complete, the image melts into a rotating moon and onto an egg-shaped shape, which shatters and disperses. What emerges is loud and confident; a fiery human figure exploding in pain and pleasure.
This work is pure emotional release, and its short duration heightens the intensity of the experience.
4SITE
Stompin Youth Dance Company
September 15 & 17
QVMAG Royal Park, Launceston
In Stompin’s 30th year, the 2022 Choreographic Project celebrates past and present Stompin dancers with the aim to support Stompin alumni as they graduate from tertiary training and enter the professional sphere. The choreographers of this program – Ebony Nichols, Zoe Howard and Gabrielle Martin – have been mentored by former Stompin Artistic Director, Bec Reid, with their works performed by the senior company.
In the context of the Junction Arts Festival, 4Site is presented inside the old Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. These spaces, primarily designed for viewing wall mounted images and human-scaled freestanding sculptures, present both challenges and opportunities. Preshow, the audience and dancers observe each other and their surrounds. Some dancers pose in still life groups; others lead our eyes toward the first destination.
The focus of the three works, we are advised in Stompin's promotional material, is on the mundane: investigating beauty, monotony and disruption. Howard’s piece, All Thumbs, sees each performer quite self-absorbed in the gestures of a one-way conversation. Sounds of voices and birds in the distance may or may not be intended, but add to the intrigue. Seven dancers move around a void framed by glass banisters. Chance collisions allow for brief meetings as the pace picks up. A wall of dancers offers direction to different places, while soloist Jesper Harrison – seen by many through two sheets of glass – seems to obliviously distract their offerings with a solo of lunging and twisting. It seems perspective and focus are meant to shift and sometimes swap completely. As gestured directions become more like twitching hands, interactions develop between the dancers. Faster, cleaner phrases are repeated and mechanical. Unison is formed and broken. This shared moment quickly passes.
Nichols’s The Ball is in your Court is next. It is set in a darker gallery with a long off-centre corridor leading from it. A prone body is surrounded by a mass of lime green tennis balls. Seven dancers deliver themselves and more balls to the scene. With a strong use of the corridor, dancers jump stamp and spin their entrances, only to retreat on a call.
Shapes are formed using the now scattered props. Diagonal group lines shift to manual handling; each idea presented builds and dissolves away along the corridor. This pattern repeats with slower sections focusing on individual movers through to group tasks involving performers (and some audience members) struggling to hold ever-increasing loads of balls. Those who can sustain the task cradle and protect their load. A further section seems to refer to the traced lines on the balls as dancers roll the objects around their bodies in a fascination of contour and contact.
Listen In completes the trio of works. In collaboration with the dancers, Martin's choreography focuses on a visceral experience, leading the group movement in a spiral form and back again. The dancers begin walking backwards and forwards. A rope sculpture provides a space behind in which to move as the group spreads. Gradually shifting to the unencumbered space in front of the sculpture, the dancers are now free to begin larger movements: rolling and spiralling, increasing in tempo and taking turns to hold the space in the centre of the swirl. Jumping and falling, faster and faster the circle continues until there is a blissful shift in speed. A line forms; bodies connect; the circle slows and descends to the floor. There is a beautiful moment of stillness, arms linked and hands reaching, before the group melts towards and up the doorway. Swooping and reaching, the group collects the remaining dancer and the work resolves into stillness. In the program material Martin asks that we don’t try to understand this work "but to let it wash over you". That approach is very satisfying.
- LESLEY GRAHAM
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