REVIEW: Sydney Festival 2024 (part 1)
ENCANTADO
Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
Reviewed January 5
HOPE HUNT AND THE ASCENSION INTO LAZARUS
Oona Doherty
Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company
January 10
WOLVERINE
Dance Makers Collective
Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company
January 10
GURR ERA OP
Ghenoa Gela; Produced by Force Majeure in association with ILBIJERRI Theatre Company
Studio Theatre, Bangarra
January 13
The first two weeks of Sydney Festival 2024 saw dance and physical theatre performances from as far afield as Brazil and Northern Ireland take place alongside several Australian world premieres, giving this year’s festival a truly international feel. Encantado’s brief season opened at the Sydney Opera House on the same night (January 5) as the festival itself. As to be expected, it was well attended by a wide range of ticket holders and invited guests.
Encantado, presented by Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças from Brazil, is a one hour work for 11 dancers and 140 blankets. The company was formed in 1990 and this is their newest work. The aforementioned 140 blankets are a key part of Encantado, from the works opening moments when – shrouded in darkness – crouching dancers slowly unfurl an enormous pre-prepared roll of blankets towards the audience. Once laid out on the stage the dancers disappear and when the lights come up, the floor is revealed as a patchwork of colours, patterns and textures. Then, one by one, the naked dancers return and proceed to slide underneath, enveloping and wrapping their bodies in these rectangles of fabric in an astonishing variety of slow-paced movements.
While the first half of the work takes place in complete silence, the shift towards a more up-tempo second half is marked by the addition of music (recordings of indigenous Brazilian songs that were made in 2021). As the music grows louder and faster so the dancers’ movements become more vigorous, athletic and joyous, and the dancers add their own vocalisations into the mix. At times they play with the fabric, disguising and abstracting their bodies into textural forms, while at other times the cloth is used as an extension of limbs or as a humorous prop. While I couldn’t see a clear link to the environmental concerns and supernatural beings (or "encantados") that were discussed in the program notes, Encantado is an extraordinary, unusual work and well worth seeing.
A double bill of solo artist performances (approximately 45 minutes each) at Sydney Dance Company’s Neilson Studios was further proof of this space’s versatility, as we walked around the wharf's exterior to enter from the outside. So did the first artist, Sandrine Lescourant-Mufasa dancing Oona Doherty’s Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus – who made her entrance driven in the boot of a car which pulled up with the speakers on full blast and a driver and DJ (Maxime Jerry Fraisse) who also had some moves! Although she doesn’t look like a loutish young man from Northern Ireland, Lescourant-Mufasa embodies the body language, gaze and attitude with an impressive focus that makes her quite believable.
Once inside the Neilson Theatre she plays with language as much as movement, developing fragments of movement and language into a whole word or phrase through a process of repetition (like a stutter) before moving on to something new. Doherty’s choreography is grounded in street dance initially but becomes more contemporary and lyrical in style towards the end. It is broken up by spoken episodic narratives which make sense individually but don’t really connect with each other to make one longer narrative – perhaps highlighting the character's inarticulate nature?
The second solo performance is called Wolverine and is a world premiere presented by the Sydney-based Dance Makers Collective, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. It is choreographed and performed by Emma Harrison. This beautifully lit work (thanks to lighting designer Benjamin Brockman) relates only tangentially to Hugh Jackman’s "Wolverine" from the X-Men film series. It draws a parallel between the character’s wolf-like claws and the way a modern-day woman might hold keys between her fingers as a pre-emptive defensive tactic. Like Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus, Wolverine combines dance with spoken text and other vocalisations (like howling at the moon) to draw comparisons between beast and woman. The underlying concept was successfully realised in this performance.
The new Australian work GURR ERA OP made its world premiere at Bangarra’s Studio Theatre. Created, directed, written and performed by Ghenoa Gela, this piece involves an additional three performers (Taryn Beatty, Aba Bero, Berthalia Selina Reuben), making a cast of four mainland-born Torres Strait Islander women. Produced by Force Majeure in association with ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, this work centres around the plight of the Torres Strait Islanders who will be among the first to lose their island homes as ocean levels rise – but it takes a while to make that point. Firstly, the women warmly introduce themselves, talk about their ancestors (spoiler alert – there are shared ancestral links between them) and describe the journey home to Erub (Darnley) Island with descriptions so vivid you can picture the place in the mind's eye while also grasping the reverence with which they hold it.
Through brief phases of song and dance we glean an insight into the cultural traditions of island life but a recurring theme is the sound of water lapping (never before has water sounded so ominous) as the lights go dark. When the twist comes at the end it is from the audience’s direction that the cast see the storms advancing and the waves coming as their island’s shoreline is inevitably further encroached; we can see the fear in their eyes and see the futility of the defensive wall they had made from mesh-framed blocks. The work ends with a deeply felt and powerfully delivered monologue from Ghenoa Gela. I highly recommend GURR ERA OP both as a theatrical experience and an educational one.
– GERALDINE HIGGINSON
'GURR ERA OP' continues till Jan 19 and can be watched live online on Jan 20.
More online viewing is available on https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/at-home