2025 marks the 4th year of INDance programming by Sydney Dance Company in a push to showcase works by artists unencumbered by the requirement to satisfy the subscription holders who not only show their support, but also secretly influence the artistic direction of a company. This aspect of audience artist relationships has been a bit of a personal preoccupation of late as I scramble to submit a PhD rife with all the minutiae surrounding concert dance.
But enough about my latest preoccupations and back to the dance at hand. As usual I did not read the program material beforehand and so as I revisited these works I wondered if my impressions bore any resemblance to the creator’s intent. I’ll tell you, one thing’s for sure, the marketing descriptions for the works in question leave me in awe with their rich and complex imagery and motivations.
Four pieces were presented over two successive weeks. I must acknowledge the pairing of both choreographers at each event was well chosen. The first week featured back-to-back full-length works by Rebecca Jensen and Amy Zhang. The second week featured a duo in Allison Currie and Alistair Macindoe on a bill with Jo Lloyd.
As I sat in the back row straining to discern the video footage on a smart phone propped behind two Foley artists, during the opening gambit, I was overcome by the sneaking suspicion I had seen this show before. Then when the performers transitioned to what in this context could be interpreted as the show proper,(whatever that means, no you know what I mean, the first bit being the set–up) my sneaking suspicion was confirmed. Yep, I had seen this work as part of the now defunct Kier Choreographic awards in 2022. As this show unfolded, what had become a clever gimmick in a partnership between sound and visuals in the original version of Jenson’s Slip, was fully fleshed out in this relationship between Jenson as dancer and foley artist Aviva Endean in this expanded iteration.
I was prepared for the clever interplay between gesture and uncommon properties emulating specific sounds. This time around I was surprisingly sensitive to the disruption of the external symbiotic nature of the external representation. I interpreted the emergence of an interiority when the sound score departed from unison coupling with the visual component. The initial foley tradition was utilised in a literal sense as the act of drinking water was at first heard and performed through a series of manipulations of a repository of liquid to the mouth by Endean as Jenson drank, then subtly shifted to sound as if it were being heard from within the body. From here the relationship between sound and dance became increasingly abstract allowing, or requiring, the observer to continue making links between internal and external forces.
Of course this all culminated in an exquisite dance to mark the finale and if we didn’t realise the virtuosity in Bec’s physicality up to this point, she left us in no doubt afterwards. The dance was addictive in its frenetic jitters animating every surface of the studio floor.
A favourite moment would have to be as the expensive sound gear of the Foley artist nearly met its demise in a landslide, followed by (or preceding) an Irish jig (of sorts) played out on a small platform of stones. This work had just the right amount of humour and whimsy, coupled with oodles of rich imagery, to facilitate a pondering of the banal and the very crucial in these very tumultuous times.
Aviva Endean was not merely an accompanist either. Right from the beginning I got the impression that she was a magician of sorts, conjuring the consecutive worlds for Jenson to inhabit. Endean’s performative role was much more sophisticated as she played both the outsider manufacturing performance, and an insider who occasionally intruded on Jenson’s activities from behind the fourth wall. While there was no direct address, in this respect Endean could almost be seen as the aside.
You will understand how appropriate the programming was when I describe to you the second work [gameboy] by Amy Zhang. Like Jenson’s Slip, [gameboy] began with a prerecorded audio opening, delivered in the darkness, preparing the audience for what would be a similar coupling of the banal with the ultimate in technological sophistication. In this case, through the juxtaposition of extremes represented in the simulation of several transactional relationships enacted within the virtual multiverse of the world wide web.
The lights came up on two dancers each performing their own repetitive slow perfunctory sequences which were incrementally augmented. They were spaced apart from one another in a side by side configuration. This flat spatial configuration should have been a clue to their representation as avatars waiting to be activated by users, but no, I was so caught up in the dance vocabulary employed, that it didn’t even dawn on me. D’oh.
This was followed by the reproduction of a series of masochistic activities featured in infamous Japanese game shows. From sealing themselves inside the ubiquitous oversized red white and blue plaid plastic bags readily purchased from the local two dollar discount shop, before proceeding to race towards an impossible finish line, to placing a number of apples in a bucket without the use of hands while adorned in motorcycle helmet or swimming goggles. However, again like Jenson, with the progression of each scene the psychological stakes rose higher.
I was mesmerised by the segue featuring two digital gear-heads glued to the game which turned into a noticeably sinister solo. The dance was performed open-mouthed which immediately conjured the dark floating wraith like Dementor entities in the Harry Potter novels. Soon the solo became a couple as dancers William ‘Billy’ Keohavong & Ko Yamada deftly twisted, turned, wriggled and writhed as one malevolent entity. While I perceived the outstretched limbs to be a metaphor for the incalculable reach of the dark web, a friend of mine intuited the devilish organism as the embodiment of the addict.
I know I have to hold back on the comparisons between the two works, but as with Jenson, in [gameboy] Zhang also managed to cleverly manipulate temporality. Zhang drew me into her work by juxtaposing the hasty speed of competition with the interminable lag once caught in the throes of addiction, mixed in with the unnerving disorientation of navigating a pathway with no limits. Just when I thought I might tire from a concept, I was thrown into another.
The second week’s INDance program felt slightly more familiar to me. This is not to say that the works were any less compelling in their own right. It just meant I was able to draw lines and recognise lineages.
Alistair MacIndoe and Alison Currie’s Progress Report saw them upscale polystyrene packaging in their imagining of a dystopia of the not too distant future. While I can’t recall the dates, I know that the age of the universe, the anniversary of our earth and the evolution of man all eclipse the duration from the chronology to which we were transported. Like the two of the previous week, Progress Report opened with a simple premise, the manipulation of an object. In this case the object was a flat rectangular piece of polystyrene which was given agency through the combined interaction of Rachel Coulson’s orientation in conjunction with an industrial(?) upright fan. The engagement with these everyday objects reminded me of the experiments conducted by Simone Forti and Steve Paxton of the Judson church movement in the 1960s.
Perhaps Simone Forti is still playing heavily in mind as I saw a fantastic exhibition of the famed Judson Church movement at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in January 2018. I remember going there as part of a delegation to take part in the First Nations Dialogues conference. We were upstate on Bear Mountain when I decided to make an escape and hopped a black limo back into the city to catch the final days of the exhibition. In hindsight I maintain this was a worthwhile naughty escapade.
As part of that exhibition I saw excerpts of Forti’s seminal work Five Dance Constructions & Some Other Things originally performed in May 1961, Forti at Yoko Ono’s studio. Performers that night included Forti, Ruth Allphon, Marni Mahaffay, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Carl Lehmann-Haupt. (Thank you Wikipedia for that quick reference.)
In one of Forti’s works dancers manipulate, deconstruct and reconfigure a children’s see-saw, while in another they traverse a slant board with knotted ropes attached at equidistant intervals. It was the childlike open enquiry which made those works so compelling. The work-in-progress nature or the engagement which saw the dancer shed the aspect of pageantry I so enjoyed when I was exposed to those works in person, as opposed to the eulogising of them in print and film. It was this aspect of inexhaustible curiosity which felt slightly compromised by the conceptual intent.
However in the case of MacIndoe and Currie’s Progress Report the physical enquiry was not a thing in and of itself as there was an overarching concept holding the action together, which was (almost inevitably) environmental. As the work played out and the stage space was progressively inundated with the ubiquitous packaging, we simultaneously learned of its inception, as an accidental (and somewhat ironic) component extract of a tree, to the nefarious fossil fuel bi product we now know.
I have witnessed and taken part in many environmentally driven concert dance works of late and while the cynical part of me is inured to the incessant newsfeed regarding the dire future I, like many around me suffer recurring bouts of anxiety wondering if it’s really too late, if we have done enough and why we aren’t getting a wriggle on. The moment within this work came as Coulson ascended the polymer Mount Everest upstage and was consolidated by the transformation of the theatrette into macromolecular synthetic snow globe. So beautiful yet cataclysmic. This for me was the denouement of Progress Report, representing our love/hate relationship with consumerism.
Again I was reminded of another work. I recognised in this exhibition of excess, the same fervour from Dean Walsh when he speaks and performs his concerns for the environment. Threshold:NRC performed at PACT Theatre in 2018 was the result of his ongoing research into plastic pollution and its effects on marine life. Walsh, known for his ‘leave no prisoners’ approach, went one step further by eating plastic scraps on stage. After his show was finished we helped clean up his set of plastic waste for what seemed like millennia. In cleaning up we were made all too aware of our collective complicity and carelessness regarding waste. Walsh’s upscaling of waste extended to costuming whereby his assumption of aquatic life consisted of a vertebrae constituted from the little plastic fish that hold soy dispensed by sushi vendors, which were affixed to either side of his spine.
Last on this list was Jo Lloyd’s FM Air. Reading the short blurb beforehand, instead of afterwards, may have helped me read this work. If the intent was compulsory, a quick study might have acted as a guide. No matter as there was much food for thought regardless.
Unlike the other works on this bill when FM Air got going it really got going, in a display of physical endurance, which was only nearly matched by Jenson’s similarly virtuosic finale.
I am not sad I didn’t see nor look for the revisitation of gendered roles from Lloyd’s previous choreographies. Despite my ignorance I did immediately think of tutus, the heavily layered skirts adorned by ballerinas, when I laid eyes upon the large tulle cocoon which engulfed the dancing trio. After the white on white on black colour schematic of Progress Report I more than appreciated the veritable kaleidoscopic colour wheel in costuming in FM Air. The optical treatment of the tulle prompted me to think of images in time lapse – devoid of smooth continuity, or the photographs taken of fast moving cars with cameras set to slow moving apertures. Whatever the motivation I was in the midst of feeling – that feeling of life as a rollercoaster of inevitable uncertainty with no end except for the inevitable grand finale. In other words, Lloyd’s demanding score was the appropriate closer for this quadruple bill as the vitality or life force it exhibited in its unrelenting pace and vigor represented the reason we have the opportunity to contemplate how we live.
As a former student of the Martha Graham School where, as Graham Crackers (the name we were assigned by those then radical downtown dancers, residing in the meat district of New York), my imagination couldn’t help but wander in the direction of Martha’s Lamentation as I watched the three bodies fight for their own trajectories in FM Air. In 1930, donning a tube of purple knitted jersey fabric, Graham’s body produced a series of dramatic angular shapes which epitomised emotive energy. While FM Air did not represent any particular emotion to me, I was at more than one point driven to feelings of emotion, within myself and for the dancers as the work became a durational feat.
In light of my experience this year I await next year’s program with eager anticipation.
Vicki Van Hout
FORM Dance Projects
Blogger in Residence
Simone Forti. Slant Board. 1961 | MoMA https://share.google/ykWTzFjwj0zoZ8pHQ