All right, so I have another blog on the boil, regaling you with this past month’s activities. But you’re not going to receive my erstwhile insights regarding the month that was May until halfway through June I guess because I am going to throw convention to the wind and divert your attention to a show that’s not hit the boards yet.
The show that will be is Scary Piece of Work (SPOW) which will premiere in two days time in The Studio at the Opera House by the irrepressible Martin del Amo. Martin has returned to his solo format (some will say he never left) in a quest, he will inform you, to unpack the horror genre. ‘What the…?’, I can almost hear those in the know remark.
Wait. It’s not what you think.
Ahh, how to tell you without actually giving the game away. Well don’t rock up if you think you’ll be treated to the first of a double feature featuring a b- grade low budget kind of horror that had titles like Chopping Mall which debuted in 1986, or Killer Klowns from Outer Space, circa 1988 or the infamous Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead, also known as Dead Alive (1992), which according to Google AI, is touted as one of the genres goriest. No, when you deign to inhabit the darkened theatre in our nation’s finest theatrical hub you will dine on the greatest type of fear, replete with psychological manipulation more readily associated with film noir. Think of del Amo as the classic voice over drawing us into his world as, the inevitable anti-hero, the unlikely adversary to the underbelly of impending doom.
Tonight as I am treated to the first full aural and visual treatment of SPOW I anticipate an accompanying light show, designed by Frankie Clarke, to be en par with films featuring an early Vincent Price, where the shadows represent evil voids, like The Long Night which had Price playing a seedy night club magician.
Now that I think about it del Amo’s seemingly benign insights have always been imbued with a hint of lingering danger, none more so than the last of his solos in It’s a Jungle Out There (2009) in which he purported to spend 24hrs on the streets of Sydney’s inner city as part of his research into the seedy underbelly of our beloved metropolis. I remember him describing a character with a condition, a rare and aggressive form of agoraphobia whereby the sufferer recreates a city within the city in his apartment. Del Amo proceeded to describe in great detail the organisation of a date with this agoraphobic which culminated in an untoward end as his unwitting suitor was taken down an unfortunate path within the manufactured version of his urban municipality. This delicious narrative was so surreal, yet so plausible that I later tried to research the medical condition further, only to discover it was fictitious. This is the genius of Martin’s work, the seamless intertwining of fact and fallacy packaged as intimate testimony.
Anybody would think by my description that Martin del Amo’s latest work does not belong to the realm of dance. This is simply not true. I would also have to say that as a creative insider, for I am dramaturg on this work, at last I was given a little insight into the embodied processes behind his dance. What I found refreshing was that, rather than a series of pre-ordained sequences that, performed in a certain way become imbued with a certain intent, each danced vignette was underpinned by an overriding movement impetus which signified the mood or purpose.
All right I lied about not knowing how Martin crafts movement. As a performer in his work Slow Dances for Fast Times (2009), I found I had to perform a series of his devised warm up exercises in order to recapture each night, the masculine swagger I needed to dance in a male suit jacket and pants to Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower. The answer for me was in finding the right kind of coordination between each isolation. As a dancer I was challenged to simultaneously give each part of my body equal agency. In Body Weather this is called an omni-centric practice and it wasn’t until working with Martin, himself a longtime Body Weather practitioner, that I came to understand the dynamic complexity involved in this form of choreographic composition. It also stands to reason that practicing Body Weather also produces its own idiosyncratic movement aesthetic and in del Amo’s case magnifies the surrealist psychological state perfectly.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the tight relationship between Martin and his sound collaborators in Gail Priest and Marcus Whale. Priest creates a world of volatility from the moment the audience enters the theatre with the same subtlety and attention to detail as Martin himself, while Whale distorts and stretches del Amo’s text to heighten the air of surrealist ambiguity which permeates every aspect of this performance.
Side bar- As a dramaturg I don’t know how useful I was in the actual realisation of Scary Piece of Work, I am just honoured I was invited along for the ride.
Be sure to catch it 11th to the 13th of June. I love to hear about your experience.
