All art competes
Alison Croggon, Carissa Lee & Robert Reid (WITNESS)
All art competes. It competes for fruition, jostling in an artist’s unconscious with a million other impulses until something necessary, something timely, pushes to the front and demands this work be made. It enters a world that’s full of things that require our notice: news on the latest catastrophe, family commitments, bills, appointments, taxes, nourishment… And then it stands among all the other art-things, asking that people pay attention.
The Keir Choregraphic Award makes this aspect of artistic competition explicit. Each judge decides which eight pieces, out of dozens of entries, will be performed before an audience. Every member of that audience then brings their subjectivity, their experience and knowledge, with them. Afterwards, they take the art work with them out into the wider world as part of their conscious memory. In each memory, some art works will stay. Some will disappear. It’s impossible to say which. It is different for every audience member. And this part of the context that shapes the perception and to say that art has context is barely to scrape the surface of the volatility of what this means. “Context” includes the cultural and social ideas, histories and disciplines that feed into a work’s formal and conceptual structures, or the biographical details of an artist’s consciousness. But it also pertains to those watching. Each of us brings a different context to our perception of any work of art. Often I find myself moved by the fact that human beings will gather together in a certain space, having mutually decided that they will spend time – maybe an hour, maybe a day – to be present at a performance. That artwork, whatever it is, will enter the minds of whoever is there, and again compete for attention with all the infinite busyness of a lived existence.
Among other things, KCA is the attempt to choose a performance that will survive the attrition of forgetting, that will leap through the on-going flood of experience and carve a place for itself in the minds of those who watched it. This is guesswork at best: it is often impossible to know what stays and what doesn’t, and it’s difficult to really know why one and not the other does. Different minds bring different worlds. Writing down responses is part of the act of remembering. It brings personal memory back into the context of the world. It shows our partiality, in all senses.
When Witness Performance attended the KCA, just after the project launched, the three of us – myself, Robert Reid and Carissa Lee – each brought our own subjectivities with us, trained by different disciplines and experiences. We responded as artists, as critics of varying experience, as human beings with particular biographies. We all saw all eight works, and decided afterwards which dances we wanted to write about.
These are our responses.
Alison Croggon
Performance critic, novelist, poet and librettist, Witness Co-founder
A Caltex Spectrum, by Amrita Hepi
Caltex. Founded in 1936. Originally the Californian Texas Oil Company, a division of the gigantic multinational energy company Chevron. The world’s third largest oil exporter.
I’m just old enough to remember the old petrol bowsers with the red Caltex star. For me they were redolent of the romance of road travel, as memorialised in a thousand Hollywood movies: pulling into a petrol station in the middle of nowhere to be met with a weathered attendant in a branded coverall, the adults stubbing out their cigarettes in the car’s ashtray.
Whether we like it or not, the culture of oil is an indelible part of the western imaginary, a symbol of the 20th century dream of domination and its toxic 21st century unravelling. It enters the minutiae of all our private lives – teenage erotic fumbling in a car, the throbbing charge of a motorbike, the smell of petrol – and opens out into burning oil wells in Iraq… They’re full of toxic nostalgias that, like the image of the open road, signify both freedom and the drive to dominate landscapes, environments, experience.
And now, as climate change rips our weather patterns to pieces, they’re the pervasive symbol par excellence of the capitalist drive to orgasmic apocalypse. In A Caltex Spectrum, Bundjulung/Ngapuhi choreographer Amrita Hepi powerfully takes on this semantic complexity. Hepi employs dynamic, rigorous movement that endows her three dancers – Jahra Rager, Tyrone Robinson and Sarah Vai – with an staggering range of allusiveness and expression.
credit Gregory Lorenzutti
It opens in darkness with a visceral score by Daniel Von Jenatsch and Sarah Scott that pulses through your gut. An ominous flash of sheet lightning briefly reveals three human silhouettes and a motorbike: and then we are back in darkness. Tiny flashing lights move in the edgeless space, pinpoints of bright colour. We know they’re attached to dancers, we sense them even in the dark, but we can’t see the edges of their bodies. They’re not quite human: star-stuff embodied as corporeal presence, tech and flesh, ambiguous, threatened and threatening. It’s a disorientating beginning that shifts as the lights lift to a series of videos that play behind the dancers – stormy Mad Max desertscapes, deep-sea oil rigs, atomic explosions of flame climbing into the sky. Everything is burning.
The dancers move through a series of erotically charged tableaux in which colonised landscapes become colonised bodies, bodies become landscapes of desire. Everything is fluid and permeable: the dancers open their mouths and flashing lights disconcertingly illuminate their interiors: they twist and writhe, in pain or in ecstasy, impelled by immersive electronic sound. Sometimes the dancers vocalise: at one point there’s a chorus of “fuck”, the word, like the dance, transforming through iterations from bare sound to multiple meanings. The movement is sharp, focused and kinetic, shifting from solos to duos to trios, sometimes abrasive, sometimes lyrical, always sensual.
A moment where a dancer stops still, and we hear her panting: her face is vulnerable, open, perhaps afraid of this cycle of destruction that is so fast and exciting. The panting amplifies: she is suddenly the object of a desire that is obscene and mocking: but interestingly, the desire demeans the man, not the woman. The dancers step past this moment, for nothing remains constant, flickering along the spectrums of desire between death and life, catastrophe and survival. The motorbike is a constant focus of the dancers’ attention. They ride it like lovers, kiss it, caress it, or use it as a weapon to run into each other’s prone bodies. It’s empowerment and disempowerment, lubricious and unyielding. The motorbike is never actually started: it’s pushed around the stage by the dancers. One dancer steps off it and kisses her biceps, her hands, all up her arms. She knows that the only real power of this machine is her own strength.
Personal Effigies, by Melanie Lane
In the context of the Keir Choreographic Award, with its focus on experimental choreography, it’s interesting to see a piece that explicitly harks back to one of the most ancient functions of dance. Javanese-Australian Melanie Lane’s Personal Effigies is a ritualised work that draws heavily on the notions of dance as ritual and invocation. This solo work demonstrates both the rewards and difficulties of this kind of exploration. As its title suggests, it’s a personal piece that clearly draws on Lane’s Javanese heritage, and it generates some of its most powerful moments from alluding to Asian dance traditions. But there’s something in the appropriation that remains discomforting: a sense that the various elements gathered together are not quite integrated, so that sometimes the effect is more of decoration rather than embodied meaning.
Perhaps the problem exists in the ways these movements are alienated from any context except the dance itself. Lane says that she is drawing from “imaginary archetypes”, synthesising “constructed bodies” for “a particular body”. This particular body – Lane’s – goes through various transformations throughout the dance. The movement, a fusion of balletic, contemporary and Asian choreography, is accompanied by Chris Clark’s cello, played live with an electronic score.
When Lane begins she already has a suggestion of mask, a gilt layer of makeup over her upper face. Various props – a mirror, two conch shells, a bundle of costumes – are laid out on the stage, and Lane serially interacts with each of them. In the most successful sequence she seems to be channelling the avatar of a trickster god: she plays with the mirror, a chunky rectangular piece of glass or perspex which she can pick up and manipulate to reflect her body in different ways. It’s thick enough to stand up by itself, and she uses it to create a series of charming illusions: at one point she seems to be flying, at others she has three legs or three arms or no head. She then strips down to a see-through body costume, both naked and not-naked, and picks up the conches. They become erotically charged objects she sucks and blows, extensions of her feminised body. Finally she ceremonially unfolds the bundle and puts on a spectacular silk costume, her face obscured by a huge golden mask that seems to be abstracted from traditional Javanese masks.
This sequence was for me where the balance tipped: I didn’t know how to read it. Masks are powerful and complex, and used in multiple ways through all cultural traditions: they are always a mode of transformation. Was this mask an invocation of a god, and if so, which one? A personal god, an effigy? Was the entire dance the creation of a fetish, in which the inanimate is infused with the power of a spirit? Somehow this image was already too over-determined: unlike the earlier sequences, it wasn’t sufficiently abstracted out of its cultural or historical weight to bear lightly on the performance. I felt that it was only dress-ups: that the ritual demanded a god, and the god was absent.
“I felt that it was only dress-ups: that the ritual demanded a god, and the god was absent.”
Post Reality Vision, by Nana Biluš Abaffy
Nana Biluš Abaffy’s Post Reality Vision, on the other hand, clearly has no truck with gods. Out of the whole program, this is probably the work that skews most to theatre: it employs techniques of performance that I’ve seen in shows by the Daniel Schlusser Ensemble or The Rabble, and in many ways reminded me of The Rabble’s early work.
Abaffy’s statement says Post Reality Vision stems from two sources: the dance marathons that were common in the Great Depression, which often went for days and in which the contestants, desperate for the prize, sometimes literally danced themselves to death; and Michelangelo’s self-portrait, the flayed skin of St Bartholomew that figures in The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Both these things are, in drastically differing ways, compelling images of the destructive nature of art. It’s difficult not to read Michelangelo’s image of himself as, at least in part, a humorous complaint about the physical punishment of painting the fresco. And many contemporary artists facing the scrabble for survival in the internet age will feel a pang of empathy for the deadliness of the dance marathons, for the necessity to keep going past their limits.
I read the artist’s statement after seeing the dance, and it was difficult to read these themes back into the performance. The only reference to marathons, aside from the obvious context that this dance is itself part of a competition, is an illuminated sign placed front stage that warns the audience not to touch the contestants, and the many prop lights that are never turned on. The physical presences of the three dancers (Abaffy, Milo Love and Geoffrey Watson) seem languid rather than exhausted. There are, on the other hand, many references to classical art: broken plaster heads, like the remains of Renaissance statuary; a gold-framed reproduction of Michelangelo’s portrait. There are so many props that the stage took a while to set up: it’s a melange of lights, broken plaster statues, chairs, a tv screen, microphones. The performers move among them enacting various scenarios – fucking the statue, posing like women in classical paintings, filming each other.
For me, the performance remained mostly impenetrable. Some gestures – such as Milo Love knocking the painting out of its gilded frame, or the performers posing like classical paintings – seem to be an argument about artistic canons. I was never quite sure why Watson was nude from the waist down; perhaps it was a sardonic comment about the gratuitous nakedness of the female nude? Certainly there’s subtext about binary gendering: each performer is ambiguously gendered, in costuming and gesture. But somehow the movement slid past me, never quite coalescing into the moment. As in Schlusser’s work, the performers sometimes mutter things that can’t quite be heard by the audience; but the sense of “overheardness” is lost, because they are talking to themselves rather than to each other. And it lacks the rhythmic dramaturgy that can judge the exact point when the audience’s attention begins to falter. This kind of work walks a very fine line, and I felt that Post Reality Vision often stumbled off it.
It’s among the least focused of the eight works, although it contains powerful moments, many of them around the undeniable stage presence of Abaffy herself. But maybe in the end it was one of those works where the audience feels irrelevant: we’re present, but, as with the sign at the front of the stage, we aren’t permitted to touch it.
Carissa Lee
Actor, writer, Witness First Nations Emerging Critic
The Wetness, by Bhenji Ra
She’s slippery, she’s fish, she’s hard to catch and she’s meant to be. She’ll slip through your fingers, no matter how big and wide they are, lost from your sight she’s saying, “you can’t have me”.
Red lighting, a sound mixing desk in the centre up-stage. A white heart propped up house-right. A figure enters silhouetted against the dim red cyclorama (Angel Ho) wearing a ridiculously huge Matador-esque hat. Ho begins the music. It’s gloriously nightmarish, industrial and epic. If Beastie Boys, Trent Reznor, Joey Jordison and some random person breaking glass decided to collaborate, this might have been the end result. I honestly loved it. The volume in the space was okay for me, but I like to hang out in mosh pits and listen to industrial goth music. I’m not sure if it was the right volume for every patron in attendance. The person sitting next to me covered her ears for most of the musical intro.
When Bhenji Ra enters she’s wearing what looks at first like a furry koala costume, but then you realise it’s actually a heart on her head, not ears. The costume is blue and scaly, with hearts on the stomach, buttocks and legs, her outfit is padded to create a Kardashian-like figure of amplified thighs and buttocks. Considering the heat in that room, I couldn’t help thinking, fuck wearing all that gear. She moves slowly, dragging her feet with an intoxicated sway that turns into intricate foot movement, her face vacant and expressionless. We hear her heavy breathing, and realise that she’s mic’d up. As her character begins to emerge through her movement and breath, Ra meets the eyes of audience members, mouthing words. She makes random vocal sounds (the mic was way too loud for this) accompanied by even darker music. Ho emerges from the behind the sound desk to record her on his phone, projecting her image onto the big white heart.
Ra approaches the front row, takes off the glittery blue heart she’s wearing on her head and puts it on an audience member. She starts repeating the phrases “slipping, bad bitch”, an echo of the generic vocal filler that we often hear in modern pop music, gyrating sexily in her furry get up. This performance has an edgy burlesque feel to it. Ra seems to be satirising contemporary sexuality with a persona of the breathy diva. She uses the audience to emphasise her status, through unwavering eye contact and the direct address of sexualised lines. She asks audiences members to assist with her costume change, although she’s not invasive, but it was comic when the audience members attempted to comply. Despite the audiences’ apprehension or giggly awkwardness at this engagement with her, played up the interaction like they wanted her, and she was resisting them. Ra’s cheekiness sifting into her performance was my favourite part. She keeps up the sexy façade, even when when there was a bit of a wardrobe malfunction with some unruly boots. It didn’t matter: Ra made light of it, but still absolutely owned it.
Watching Ra own the space, control the audience, and immerse herself in her performance made me envy her freedom and her confidence. Whether she was wearing that furry onesie, or the stunning lingerie that was revealed underneath, she was beyond expectations, requirement or consequence. Whether we liked it or not, she was the bad bitch in the room. One of the strongest performances, and definitely the most enjoyable, of the two KCA programs.
Memoir for Rivers and the Dictator, by Lilian Steiner
At acting school, my favourite acting teacher made us do a particular exercise. The class would sit at the back of the auditorium of the theatre while one of the other students would walk onto the stage and say “I own this space.” Our teacher made a couple of students do it about five times, and she still didn’t believe them. If Lilian Steiner had been in that class, all she would have had to do was walk on the stage. You’d believe her.
Steiner’s performance begins with her on the stage in a silver costume a little like a space suit, backed by pulsing electronic music. The stage is lit a pale green. Her outfit highlights her movement well: it creates a water-like effect that only happens when she moves. Her ballet-inspired movements are both contradicted and complemented by the accompanying music: they are simply beautiful, long-limbed and clean, but small details – her hands shaking, or rapping on the ground around her – betray the sense of a different internal journey.
It felt as if I were watching something flowing right in front of me. Her fluid movement and shimmering costume made me think of icy water running down a window. It’s a shock when Reuben Lewis strides across the stage, trumpet in one hand, and sweeps her up with his other arm and casts her on the floor. It’s an act of abrupt silencing.
Steiner gets back up again. She tries to move and toward him, but keeps being drawn back. It’s as if she will never reach him, as if she’s destined to replay this action of wanting to be closer to him, but never getting there. Her gestures suggest that she wants to challenge him, but her face betrays that she wants to be understood. Lewis plays a single note on the trumpet, which, accompanied by her movement of retreat, makes it seem as if she’s a balloon running out of air, being taken with the wind. This movement repeats and then they move to the side of the stage. Each performer grabs a microphone on a stand and moves it to the centre before the lights go out. I thought, what a cool ending, we will never hear what they have to say.
But the lights do come back on. Each performer is now in a spotlight, Steiner in front and Lewis directly behind her. He continues to play the trumpet , and Steiner delivers a monologue or poem. Steiner’s spoken piece painted a faint watercolour of images such as large camps and a dictator. It felt like there was more water than paint in this piece. Her delivery began strongly, but the poem was too long and it lacked a sense of dramaturgical structure, which meant the images ran off the pages as if they had no definitive outline.
In her program notes Steiner speaks of us all being artefacts in flux. Perhaps the lack of definition reflected the fact that artefacts, old words on paper, do crumble and fade, as we do. However, there wasn’t enough there to keep me as engaged as I was during her previous unspoken defiant-yet-fluid movements.
I was moved by Steiner’s intense discipline throughout this piece. In a room without air conditioning, all the competition dancers endured the heat of bodies in the room, stage lights, and in some instances, heavy costumes. Towards the end, Steiner returns to dance, and there were moments when I saw the sweat dripping off her nose and chin while she cut her elegant figures. She refused to waiver and wipe it away, as some dancers had, which I think added her character’s strength within her performance. The performance was bookended with further dancing and a kind of stand-off between the two performers. Steiner, her back to the audience, faces Lewis, who collapses. She continues her dance with new-found freedom, until she too, collapses. She lets her movement end when it ends her, rather than allowing someone to silence her again.
Robert Reid
Playwright, director, critic, games designer, theatre historian, Witness Co-Founder
Yoni, by Prue Lang
Two bodies are in the space. Two women. The space is dark, and their movement together flows in and out of making circles and reaching through them. The building blocks of play are here in their repetitions. More playful than a ritual, less free than a game. There’s gentle blue backlight, it feels calm. They intertwine around each other. They remind me of DNA.
They’re being silently watched from the shadows by a woman at a desk. She sits and watches from just in front of us. The desk, the set of the shoulders, make her seem like an official. A timekeeper or an adjudicator. This is the first work of the Keir Choreographic Award, presented as part of Program One. Yoni, the work of choreographer Prue Lang and dancers Mikaela Carr, Lauren Langlois, Amber McCartney and Tara Jade Samaya, announces itself as a feminist work in its program note. It assumes a comparatively superficial feminism as a cloak to embody a much deeper and more sophisticated feminist critique.
The first moment ends and is abruptly replaced by a new game. The dancers feint and spar with each other, passing combinations of moves back and forth, as the adjudicator calls out the names of those who have “won” each “round.” The rules of this game are not immediately clear, but the kind of play is all-too-familiar. They compete. They win or lose at the decision of an outsider. It’s physical. They breathe heavily, like athletes. The scene ends and shifts suddenly again, becoming a general knowledge quiz about the achievements of women through the ages, the young women on stage competing to demonstrate their knowledge of the names of women throughout history. This again suddenly transforms into a historical litany of a timeline in which patriarchy is abandoned, a world in which women shape and guide the future of human development.
The world being modelled in Yoni is one of discontinuous rule-sets that are endlessly, suddenly disrupted, which share a constant thread of social relations constructed around rules of competitive play. The politics of the piece itself is plain, particularly in the spoken text, but its politics are subtler than the textual surface might allow. The list of names you should know but don’t because patriarchy suppress the contribution of women, or the future in which world peace has been achieved with the destruction of patriarchy: these are the rhetoric of the work, set pieces Lang uses to model the operation of the world. The more sophisticated critique made by Yoni is the modelling and performing systems of competition.
Though the exploration of the mechanics of oppression through competition and erasure is strong in this piece, the work itself cries out for depth. It makes me wonder if Yoni is conceptually constrained by its context: the twenty-minute time limit and its positioning within a competitive framework limit its scope as a world building exercise. In the world as it is, the games that the dancers play for us suddenly and abruptly change. The rules around them go from the simple proto-play of the first moment through sports to quiz to global politics. The women on stage navigate that world of suddenly changing rules and goals with a camaraderie that carries them through together.
The dramatist in me can’t help but feel like this is just act one.
Stop-Go, by Branch Nebula
Stop-Go is the third work on the first night, presented after interval by Branch Nebula (Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters). The audience files back into the space and is requested to remove their shoes, placing one in a grid of green boxes projected onto the stage and carrying the other back to our seats. Immediately we are invested in the work, whether we like it or not. We have a personal stake in what ever is going to happen next. I personally have awaiting me a long journey of acute awareness of my shoe throughout the next twenty minutes.
At our seats we find instructions. I’m sitting at the back and am also at the back of the line to return so as I climb people are discovering their instructions around me. Sharing them with the people next to them. Already the whole room is more alive than I’ve seen it yet.
The instructions give us timed actions to perform over a period of ten minutes. They include running through the ring tones on our phones, sitting and standing in the audience, applauding for fifteen seconds (a lot longer than you think if you don’t really mean it), getting on stage to roll around and picking up the shoes to throw them to the side of the stage, then build a pile from them and various other actions. Branch Nebula mention in their program note that this work opens “their choreographic toolkit for public inspection and use” and so I wonder if these are the building blocks of their rehearsal practice; move in such a way, do specific action, contrast, repeat.
I still don’t have my shoe.
In fact, the hell knows where my other shoe is now. Somewhere in the pile. I couldn’t see it.
Trust, these moments are all about trust.
Branch Nebula use us, the bodies in the room, to fill the room with chaos. And it is chaos. It quickly becomes apparent that we all have different instructions and for 10 minutes those instructions unleash noise and movement all over.
In this kind of space people let their guard down. They stop performing for each other and focus instead on completing the task at hand. Conventional norms around social interaction between strangers loosen. Even I managed to talk to a couple of people.
At then end of ten minutes you return to your seat. The count down clock that has been projected throughout is the externalised force that gives meaning to the activity and authority to the instructions. Now it gives you a final instruction. Repeat all your actions of the last ten minutes in one. I’m impressed at how many people try to do it. I get barely half way through mine before the minute is up.
We’re now told we can collect our shoe.
Oh yeah, my shoe. That’s somewhere the pile that I helped build. I can’t see it so it must be underneath. I’ll wait. Also, everyone’s in there searching for their shoes. I’m the guy at the airport luggage carousel who waits till everyone else is gone to go get his bag. I can wait a few rounds, I’m not going any where so urgent that I can’t wait for it to go round a couple of times. I wait.
I still can’t see it now the crowd and the pile has thinned…. Yeah, this is what I want. To be the guy on stage at the end going, sorry, has any body seen my shoe? It’s a red doc with blue laces… No I’ll just go back to my seat without it and see if the stage manager found an extra somewhere after.
Then it appears. Thrown back into the pile by someone who grabbed it by mistake, I assume.
There is relief enough for me to sit down on the stage and just put my shoes on while everyone makes their way back to their seats. I’m not even alone, someone sat next to me to do the same thing. For which moment of solidarity is a shore on the other side of the storm. Through which I clung to my shoe as a life raft. As we return once more to our seats, with the screen telling us that if they win Branch Nebula will share their winnings with all those present, it feels briefly like the end of a stadium concert.
If they win, I want my cut.
Public Action, by Luke George
Throw a group of dancers into the middle of an audience, a slowly cascading, slow motion explosion follows. Throw a pebble in slow motion into a pond and see the ripples. Luke George describes Public Action as a social choreography, a collective negotiation between bodies, objects, artist and audience.
With Public Action, George sets us first to consider an audience. A projection on the back wall (Nick Roux) of an audience sitting in the seats you’re currently sitting in. Not you, though. Ripples run through the present audience, as they recognise that the projection is not themselves. The projected audience sit and watch us. They itch and shift more as time goes on. Or maybe I only think they do. I think I recognise people in that crowd. People I imagine are probably part of the Dancehouse community. I imagine the call-out that might have gone out for volunteers, to Luke Georgeʻs community, to the other dancers in the Keir award program, spreading out like a ripple through friends and supporters.
At this point a dancer enters through the space and up into the audience, the “us” audience, not the projected audience. They edge into a row of seats and have a short, quiet conversation with the person sitting in the middle of the row, who gets up and goes to stand on the front edge of the stage to watch.
As with fluid dynamics or partial physics, the audience gradually follows her lead. Having been given permission to act outside of the usual conventions of viewing, the audience begins to take ownership of its own agency.
It takes a lot to move this audience.
In fact it takes an explosion.
With the seat vacated the first dancer crouches around it, hugging it perhaps: from my vantage I canʻt really see what heʻs doing. Already the ranks of audience have contorted around the action, twisting inward on themselves to see.
There are giggles and comments starting to emerge from the knot tied in the audience. Maybe from the dancer, maybe apologising for the disturbance or for touching strangers. It starts to look like they’re tumbling slowly over and through the chair and may have been joined by a second dancer. The disturbance in the audience is getting wider, spreading, growing. The shock wave pushing us back around it.
Another dancer enters from the stage, reminding us that there is space behind the action. Space that can be occupied. The first few early adopters get out of their seats and go stand on stage to get a better view. Watching them make their decisions to move and how they carry themselves through the space is revealing of how much we subconsciously perform our decisions and signal our intentions as we negotiate space with our peers.
More dancers are added. More audience moves. The seats tumble slowly along with the dancers as part of the avalanche. A third of the audience by now are scattered across the stage and in the aisle. The rest are turned around, rubbernecking and standing. Our distribution looks like nothing so much as the scatter pattern of debris around a blast radius.
During this process, the projected audience have remained watching, impassive. They have assumed a brace position during the worst of the “explosion” which suggests that the shock wave has been so strong as to breach the barrier between present and past, real and represented.
Finally loud poppy music fills the space and the dancers each emerge from the audience to dance around the audience still scattered on stage. There is an almost aggressive edge to it, the feeling of being at a party just before it goes badly wrong. Here we return from the sub atomic level of the moment to the to the prosaic realities of the dance competition. The projected audience have returned to sitting watching blankly until they disappear, leaving the seats that we now occupy, empty as the dancers exit.
We applaud dutifully, from our scatter pattern across the space and then return to the natural order of things. The dancers return briefly in hi viz vests (and am I imagining hard hats?) to put the overturned seats back where they belong. A lovely cartoony flourish of city infrastructure appearing to repair the damage at the site of impact.
WITNESS was a 2018 Dancehouse Public Program guest.
Reviews first published at witnessperformance.com
