Most dance performances will leave you flexing your muscles and tapping your toes.  DOCUMENT also leaves you scratching your head – but in a good way.

Choreographer and Director Sandra Parker spent three months cooped up in Dancehouse’s labyrinthine spaces during something called a “Housemate Residency.”  The residency allowed her to focus on all things dance, and not the usual stuff that real-life housemates do (like using all the hot water and drinking the last stubby of beer).

Parker spent the time trawling through her archives, poring over 15 years worth of memories, notes and video tapes of past performances.  God knows how she managed to play all those funny old defunct formats of video…but it’s a good thing she did.  The source material makes DOCUMENT a uniquely self-reflexive and intellectual dance piece.

As Parker explains, “the process revealed the possibility of re-imagining as the means to find something new – a new set of possibilities….”  She has choreographed dancer Rebecca Jensen not to tell a story or show off her moves, but rather to investigate what she is able to reconstruct of various past performances.  We watch as memories and reconstructions of dance steps are sketched out with a pen rapidly scrawling over lined paper – or rather, in a digital version of that, projected onto a screen behind the dancer.

Sometimes, Jensen’s repetitive and relatively simple steps follow those of the pen in the video, and sometimes they overlap or even diverge completely.  It’s a fascinating tension that draws attention to the impossibility of effectively documenting something as emphatically live and “you-had-to-be-there” as dance.  It also reveals a lot about the choreographic process for those of us who are a bit in the dark about that side of stuff.  It’s surprisingly intellectual stuff for a medium that tends to be all about visual spectacle.

Jensen is dressed comfortably and plainly, the music is spare, the stage is empty and the lighting is simple to the point of stark.  Clearly, audiences wanting flashy illusionistic dance that makes you “ooh” and “aah” are going to be disappointed.  DOCUMENT has the raw feel almost of a rehearsal.  Jensen keeps looking over her shoulder, and our eyes keep darting from the dancer to the screen.  You get the feel of watching something being created right in front of you.

DOCUMENT may not be the most toe-tappingly impressive display of physical movement, but its conceptual exploration of the inherent challenges of documenting live performances will definitely get you thinking…and these ideas have a broad relevance that extends well beyond just dance.

If only all housemates were this smart.

All Images Copyright Rachel Roberts

I’ve come to realise I generally walk out of dance performances feeling either a) very non-creative b) very un-flexible c) a little un-cultured d) all of the above.

Becky, Jodi & John was different – and I was excited. This performance, presented by Dancehouse and the John Jasperse Company, takes all general conventions associated with dance and throws them back in those single-minded, convention abiding, boring, but supposedly important, dance people’s faces. The main thing I felt coming out of this performance was a surge of people-power. Let me explain…

Becky, Jodi & John is a portrait of dancers, Becky Hilton, Jodi Melnick and John Jasperse and their individual, yet entwined, commitments to dance. That’s not really anything unusual right? What is different though, is these dancers are all over the age of forty. Together all three performers tackle the issue of sustaining a career past this supposed undistinguished age. Best of all they do it with notable amounts of humour. This is a nice way of saying they pretty much take the piss out of themselves.

This theme, of having fun with your age, is constantly present. The show begins with a long list of all the injuries Becky has sustained throughout her career and consequently all the things she can no longer do. “I absolutely, under no circumstances, can jump anymore,” she tells us. At times the performance stops and is interrupted by such things as a toy elephant strapped to a remote control car and grooving to All Night Long, or a Q&A session with the audience in which the performers ‘accidentally’ forget what the questions from the audience were and continue with their own personal rant – much like what my Mum does actually. The dancers later openly admit that these ‘segments’ are in the show because they “just feel like taking a break.”

Of course there are sombre moments also, when you appreciate how fickle and fleeting a career in dance generally is. John reflects on being told, by someone he truly admired for the most part of his career, that he was no longer “experimental enough.” His response was then to perform completely naked on the stage in front of us, as if to say: “is this experimental enough for you?” It is these kinds of truly human moments which make Becky, Jodi & John so refreshing.

They don’t have all the current, post-modern choreography and sequences, instead opting to share a life lesson or two. “Generally in life you get what you want – and what you don’t want.” But this, to me, makes for an even more rewarding performance.

Images Copyright Andrea Mohin/New York Times

Gabrielle Nankivell

I left my shoes on warm concrete and stood in the rain
Dancehouse
July 8 – 12, 2009

As we emerge from splintered darkness, an antiquated suitcase slides across the stage, its origin unknown, its purpose mere mystery. Soon it will be revealed as a survival kit for life – a tidy, purpose-built container that encompasses salient lessons in advance. As our lightened vessel examines its contents we hear a tauntingly happy voice against electro-pop elevator music – this is I left my shoes on warm concrete and stood in the rain: a performance playful and tragic, light and dark, but always human.

Superbly choreographed and performed by Gabrielle Nankivell, I left my shoes on warm concrete and stood in the rain is an intensely physical ode to the frailties and strength of humanities’ psychology. Nankivell shows maturity in her clarity of movement as she whisks the audience through the thin films of an inner psyche, effortlessly contrasting aggressive, explosive physicality with quieter, articulate movements. Her skill is in her expression; she expounds madness with her challenging balance of weight and gravity, before seguing into minimalist expressions that are welcomingly more concerned with conveying truth than flamboyance.

Nankivell successfully purports that matter and makeup in reeling tragedy is simultaneously miraculous and terrifying. Luke Smiles’ soundscape, a testament to this, deals competently with the mundane, the epic and the tragic, without ever feeling overpowering. Much of I left my shoes on warm concrete and stood on the rain‘s tone, however, is conveyed through voice-over, that while often lyrical and beautiful, tends to veer distractedly into a tangled hyper-metaphor.

Indeed, during much of the performance the audience will find themselves in the dark, with a voice as their sole company. This is initially effective but does eventually become a touch exhausting; however, as soon as Nankivell reappears, these qualms are soon forgotten. It’s as though her dance is a personal catharsis – she talks of being ‘great, but not exceptional’ – but then demonstrates its fallacy in each of her well-executed movements.

This is humanity stripped bare: a catalogue of fears, hopes, dreams – and dreams-crushed – are made temporarily ethereal before vanishing in darkness.

Ultimately, I left my shoes on warm concrete and stood in the rain is another impressive contribution to contemporary dance, and further evidence that Dancehouse’s unique residency program is hugely invaluable to Melbourne’s increasingly reputable dance scene.

Twelve Restless performers, with different levels and types of disability, are confronted with twelve fully-able Rawcus performers in this fascinating exploration of the mystery of the other.

When you stand in front of me and look at me,
What do you know of the griefs that are in me
And what do I know of yours?

- Kafka, as quoted in the program notes

The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest opens with a loop of beautiful live music: guitar, piano, pan flute, cello. I’ve often noted that the fusion of genres in Australian theatre happens less between theatre, performance and dance, and more often with visual arts, music, and puppetry. That is, rather than eschewing dramatic narration for rebellious deconstruction, it engages in a sensuous tickle of all the senses, a total experience. This process usually creates, like in this case, lyrical theatre, stage poetry (as Maeterlinck demanded: “la pièce de théâtre dout être avant tout un poème”), in which the linear time of ascending action is replaced by slowly accumulating image-time, what Gertrude Stein would have approvingly called theatre as landscape.

Some of the most successful Australian theatre of recent times meticulously researched the possibilities of this approach, from My Darling Patricia’s Politely Savage and Peepshow Inc.’s Slanting Into the Void, to Vitalstatistix’s Cake (it is not surprising, therefore, that a number of names overlap in the credits of these shows). To analyse The Heart of Another with an analytical mind, thus, may be doing it great disservice.

There are moments in this performance of terrifying human beauty. More terrifying because resolutely silent – by which I don’t mean that speech isn’t present, merely that the words don’t amount to a statement, explanation, or challenge. They remain a part of the stage poetry.

Right at the beginning, all performers assemble on stage, merely breathing until they slowly smile. The variety of persons, of bodies, is astonishing – the sparse means of physical theatre work extraordinarily well at showing the individual beauty of each one of this enormous, diverse ensemble. Where will they all go?, you wonder. How will they all move? Where will this dense human mass disperse? It does and doesn’t: despite choreographic skill at emptying and populating the stage, The Heart of Another seemingly keeps the theatre densely upholstered, filled to the brim, with thick emotions, with faces, costumes, movement, but most crucially with objects.

A man is back-lit behind a life-size child drawing of a man. A woman cuts out a red heart in the paper, and through the hole starts pulling out a red scarf, a paper chain of little girls, toy animals, which another man gives to a girl, who assembles the lot in a wooden box. A mass of people unfolding a silk scarf, each with their own little assemblages: a collection of chocolate coins, or plastic roses and a plastic wedding cake. Someone’s memories, someone’s very private mementos. A girl puts words in a sequence of glass jars; another listens inside each one. Even the backstage is used to reveal a dark, private space behind the representational space at the front. At different times, the performance is counterpointed by a romantic duet, or a solo in dark sfumato.

On the one hand, it is a performance firmly situated in this world, latching onto an endless array of objects and gestures and relations and characters. At the same time, by refusing any response to this world apart from the hermetically, solipsistically intimist, it is a dance of deep, almost painful privacy. Using semi-abled performers, by definition a quiet part of our society – indeed, any society – underpins this sensuous introspection.

At multiple points, perhaps because of the opening quote, I was reminded of Kafka’s love letters to Milena Jesenska, among the most painfully intimate love correspondences of all times. There is more than a flimsy connection of this barely un-symbolist theatre to the love-letter format, with its own solipsism, planar non-narrative time, and an alchemist power to turn awkwardness, unease, fear and disgust into heavy, difficult and intensely private beauty. Instead of judging, we are led to feel. As a way of approaching the problem of able-bodiedness, this is not unintelligent. Everything in The Heart of Another is heart-breakingly beautiful in silence: loneliness, desire, the inability to connect, the girls and the boys. Members of the Rawcus ensemble seemed unaware of how much admiration they incited: the foyer buzzed with excited whispers on the beauty of particular girls.

There are, however, problems for the analytical mind. Keeping in mind that Australia is a resolutely mute culture in many aspects, that much of its best dramatic writing explores the poetic rhythms of non-communication and non-discussion (eg, Holloway’s harrowing Red Sky Morning), its predilection both for physical theatre and for ‘theatre as a poem’ becomes problematic, politically problematic.

Aesthetically, the silence of objects and people makes for very intense theatre. But, in a rich yet delicate landscape of visual effects within The Heart of Another, every object, motion and gesture resounds with what is left unsaid. The moment in which girls, all the girls, one by one join in a group homogeneous movement, although some simply cannot do it properly, struck me as somewhat aloof. In another, a man with speech impediments reads on the back stage – stirring too many memories of war orphans forced to pose at anti-war rallies, of that banal exploitation of someone’s misery for some quick, cheap compassion.

The wallpaper, framing the entire set in a florally geometric, patterned repetition of the same, may have been intended only as decoration – indeed, I commonly see Victorian wallpaper in Australian performances. It is, however, present as an unconscious atavism, a constant reminder of the oppressive, bourgeois structures that sent us all here. It was a society that created textile printing, the industrial, regimented repetition of geometrically restrained, prettified nature. So we have it: the imperative of pleasant decoration, the imperative of sameness, and in the middle of it all, elementary human wonder dancing. The effect is incongruous, raising more questions than it placates with silence. Are we watching prettified disability? Does it need to come with lush music to keep us calm? Are we refusing to think? These are just some of the nagging questions in the back of my mind. To every such political problem that arises, the answer seems to be to smother it indulgently in beautiful décor.

In targeting the body first and the mind later, there is always the danger of abandoning problems half-way through; of not allowing the audience to see clearly, and of choosing the pretty option over the less aesthetically rounded. This can happen even if there is no intention of glossing over. It happened in Cake, with its cheap conflation of baking, pregnancy and femininity; it happened in Politely Savage, with its ornate orientalization of Australia, the 1950s, and the housewife. The entire subtext of Kafka’s love letters is that of a deeply unhappy existence. Many unpleasant things may have been pushed aside in The Heart of Another in order to please the senses, but we may only realise later.

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