As promised I am hastily crafting yet another double feature this month. This blog takes up where the first left off, right in the midst of the inaugural FORM Dance Projects Take Two, Thank You festival.
Ah, yet another opportunity to plug myself. Yes, I was invited to take part in this festival as the other half of the two hander, devised by my new Kiwi compadre, Sasha Copeland, titled An Honest Conversation, which also featured Azzam Mohamed and Hoyori Maruo on previous evenings throughout the festival.
At the age of fifty- seven I can safely say I was the oldest participant in this work, come to think of it, this festival. It’s funny that after a while you get applauded for just staying in the game, by being able to pick yourself off the floor without audibly groaning. A feat I can still manage-just. Some would say this is a testament to my abilities as a consummate actor. I would have to concur as after my evening of bearing all my secrets, like I was severely inebriated at that witching hour, also known as the two o’clock confessional, I found myself chewing on anti inflammatories like I would a packet of cheap breath mints. (As advised on the back of the prescription packet of course.)
There’s nothing like performing in an intimate setting in the round with the audience seated on stage with you, encircling you. There’s also nothing like letting your guard down in front of about thirty of your students, where all foibles can be seen and heard from all angles, all at once. If I was ever going to do this type of gig it would have to be with Sasha Copeland who is as strong of body as she is of her ability to lull you into a false sense of security whereby before you know it, you are divulging things about yourself you’ve never divulged aloud. EVER.
A week after our performance I played assistant to Sasha while she led a full day of workshops with said student body at NAISDA Dance College and I was able to appreciate more fully her guided process for conducting an honest conversation while continuously improvising. In the lead up we beat rhythms in graduated complexity, we moved closer and closer in proximity, until we were not only touching, but wielding our variable body-weights, in all directions and at all levels in space.
I was surprised that above all we were able to navigate across cultures whilst also temporarily discarding our roles as teachers and theirs as subordinates. It takes skill to pair yourself up with a person in your charge and feel safe in a scenario where touching has become a touchy subject. Sasha facilitated a space whereby permission was seamlessly sought. No polite stilted engagement here. No, just robust embodiment. That takes a skillset so easily overlooked, to create a safe space for creativity.
I can’t attest to the audience experience, if it was at all entertaining, or otherwise. I just know that in this case, you can teach an ol’ dog new tricks, you just have to be up for it.
Moving on…
VOID by Tara Marsh & Luka Rayment was the first cab off the rank of an evening of short works, of two handers, as part of a competition appropriately titled Duels. Appropriately because this event rounded out the Take Two festival celebrating the pas de deux.
It is a great honour to go first as the lead act usually sets the pace. In this case Tara Marsh & Luka Rayment did not disappoint. What we, as audience members, discovered was that the standard was going to be high. No high school shmaltz to be had on this night, as every dance artist on this bill had a firm handle on the contemporary dance idiom.
VOID In the program, was described as a, ” …constant push and pull—both physical and emotional—[which] creates a tension that reflects the longing for connection amidst the silence and nothingness that surrounds them”, which was succinctly expressed. It did indeed seem as if they were the only two in the world that they had created for us. I was impressed by the language they created using a tubular piece of stretch fabric and only wished that they had explored this element even further before eventually discarding it.
It is a pet peeve of mine to be reading a program which claims to represent a myriad of lofty ideals and/ or concepts, and again reading the program notes for Natasha Sturgis’ Bruce, featuring Hugo Poulet & Kai Taberna I was pleased that the content was representative of what I witnessed on stage. This was evident in the fact that I scribbled ‘bromance’ in the box to remind me of this work afterward.
For the melding of simple everyday gesture with their increasingly robust partnering did effectively articulate the complexity regarding male relationships, of unspoken love and loyalty and belies the blokey physical interactions between men, in Australian society in particular. In hindsight I think I actually underestimated the significance of this piece because it is only in the bearing of the underlying vulnerabilities that exist between males can we ever hope to finally eschew the violence sometimes employed to maintain a mask of unhealthy masculinity.
In Tandem by Emily Bourke & Phoebe Allen was not sentimental, but rather subtly mathematical in presentation, expressed in the coverage of the floorspace and relationship of the two dancer/ makers and in the physical dynamics. The maintenance of their initial proximity to one another was definitely the strongest element in this work.
Nymphemeral by Layla Meadows & Jess Fitzpatrick marked a shift in the tone of works on offer. At first the combined posturing reminded me of a series of well crafted selfies, and Meadows and Fitzpatrick as two expert dancfluencers (dance influencers) of sorts, but as the piece moved onwards I settled into their meditative pace and idiosyncratic movement language. By the time the piece had nearly drawn to a close I was both curiously drawn to, and a tad repulsed by, the aesthetic they generated. Maybe repulsed is the wrong description, uneasy or unsettled. This was the potential genius of this piece, in its ability to elicit such a strong visceral reaction, which returned in waves. The only drawback was in the missed opportunity to expand upon a movement sequence which involved larger lateral sequential spine ripples, which provided a welcome break in tension before the strangely compelling meditative monotony returned.
AFROKADABRA by Thubalethu Ndibali featuring Maurice & Migisha reminded me of a work that Lucky Lartey had performed at Riverside as part of the Dance Bites Program titled Full Circle. I was a mentor on Lartey’s work and remember him telling me about the role of the ‘griot’, the musical historians who hold the history of their communities in their bodies. This work, like my work as an Australian Indigenous contemporary dance choreographer, is often included in the mix to remind us that there is a whole world of non-Occidental (Western) arts expression that our black box theatres are just beginning to more readily accommodate. Our works, often deemed alternative, are included in the mix to offer a window into other expressions, to aid in the expansion of conventional theatrical literacy, and to more fully understand an expanded function of dance outside its purpose to entertain. Furthermore, Thubalethu Ndibali featuring Maurice & Migisha were just bloody good dancer performers.
Eutheria by Otherworld, Lucy Doherty featuring Kristie Pike & Alana Searles, immediately brought me back into the world of the Australian Dance Party’s work The Dataset (refer to first blog in this two parter) featured in the festival. In lieu of pulsing long cylindrical lighting to summon a futuristic chronology, in Eutheria the dancers fashioned VR headsets from smart phones attached to their heads, concealing their eyes. This costuming device became at once a viewfinder relaying to us both what they see and what we are to see of them. It was both clever and humorous. There is so much potential for further application with this work I feel a full length piece can easily be developed.
Please… continue? was the seventh of nine offerings on this program and by far one of the most engaging duets I have witnessed in a while. In case I forgot to mention this evening of Duels was also a competition, whereupon I was a judge, and for which Remy Rochester & Angus Onley were the recipients of the audience choice award of $1000. Armed with suit jackets Rochester and Only navigated the powerplay between men and women, using the jackets to chart micro shifts in their relationship. Up to this point Please… continue? was the first male/female coupling on offer, which didn’t dawn on me until the work was well under way. In this respect the work represented the standard hetero normative pas de deux.
The second to last piece was titled Form and Flow: Dueto and like its predecessor, the cast was male/female. However unlike the predecessor this work was not just about the lighter side of mapping relationships, in this duet by Plonova Dance, Daniela Zambrano and featuring Bakuto the stakes were high. Right from the beginning a dancer was smuggled on stage in a box, which deftly became an apartment where deals were made to obtain a passport, the wooden structure became a symbol of the distance travelled in migration and the precarious vessel by which many are willing to stake their lives in order to do so. It is also appropriate that Form and Flow: Dueto was expressed through the genre of hip hop, from the streets, of the people. This dance genre, like the underlying theme, is generally performed on the fly in unconventional spaces where the element of risk supersedes safety. For all of these reasons, Form and Flow: Dueto was awarded the critics choice with a prize of $2000 and an opportunity to further develop the material with a studio residency and presentation in FORM’s IDEA NOW.
Rounding out the evening was me me, you you another playful offering by Jayden Wall, featuring Hugo Poulet. How appropriate to finish the evening with a superb example of kick a#* physicality. No exaggeration, no word of a lie. I left with a smile on my face and a desire to throw myself into my next dance endeavour.
So until next month….
Vicki Van Hout
FORM Dance Projects
Blogger in Residence