Byron Perry's new dance work Double Think opens in complete darkness in the vast space of the North Melbourne Town Hall. To the rhythms of Luke Smiles's electronic score, blindingly bright geometries of white light flash out and vanish. The movements are precise, created as two dancers lift small boxes concealing the light source, and there's not enough time for the light to bleed out and illuminate anything but itself. It creates a dance of image and after-image on the shocked retina, and immediately suggests that this is an experience of interiority as much as spectacle.


It introduces a dance which explores further Perry's fascination with the manipulation of objects on stage, as in his joyous 2008 collaboration with Antony Hamilton, I Like This. The major set element is a wooden wall which can be pulled apart and reassembled like children's blocks. In one sequence, the dancers are hidden behind the wall as they push differently sized blocks in and out like organ stops. This creates a beautiful geometry of shadows, but, as with the manipulation of the light boxes, this is somehow never machine-like: at some subliminal level, we're aware of the minute variations of human movement. Perry is literally animating his set.

The tension between object and human movement widens to a consideration of subconscious contradictions, the "double think" of the show's title. This becomes articulate in a word-play sequence in which dancers Kirstie McCracken and Lee Serle throw random nouns at each other, to which the other dancer responds in wilful, even satirical movement. They then reassemble the wall into two distinct halves. A dancer sits on each side and gives the other wildly contradictory instructions on what they "must" do, furiously agreeing with each other. Serle insists on control, McCracken on the lack of it. It seems very clear here that they are representing the different hemispheres of the brain.

In other sequences, such as a vision where gravity shifts and we see both dancers as if they are seated at a table from above, they become a couple, negotiating the differences and contradictions of relationship. But mostly this is an exploration of the ways in which human beings deal with and express their interior polarities.

I really enjoyed this piece, but I had a nagging sense that there was something unresolved in the whole: the tensions between object and dancer, for example, seem still in process, rather than fully articulated. In the end, I wasn't sure what this work added up to, beyond a fascinating experiment, and some beautiful dance from McCracken and Serle. Perhaps this goes back to its concept, which as outlined in the program is a little muddy.

Perry's title directly references Orwell's notion of doublethink. Doublethink, says Orwell, is "to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies." While this is an excellent description of the rhetorical strategies of someone like Andrew Bolt, I saw few connections with the dance.

Rather than the "deliberate lies" that Orwell describes, it seemed to me that Perry is exploring a creative dissonance. A more precise notion might be negative capability, the quality John Keats famously defined as the capacity to be "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason". These concepts are certainly related, but they are quite different: Orwell's idea is about destroying thought, Keats's about its genesis. I suspect a little more precision of thought - perhaps even an exploration of the contradictions and conenctions between these two ideas - might have helped to consolidate the dramaturgy of the dance.


After Double Think, I traversed North Melbourne to the Meat Market for motiroti's Journeys of Love and More Love. Written, directed and performed by Ali Zaidi, who describes himself as "Indian by birth, Pakistani by migration and British by chance", Journeys of Love is a story of odyssey, interspersed with a menu of tasting plates. After hanging around a bar decorated with bowls of flowers and pungent with incense, the audience is directed into a space which has been transformed into a large restaurant. The tables are surrounded by four huge screens that are filled with lush animations of flowers, and later with digital graphics which illustrate Zaidi's story.

It's billed as a participatory experience in which the audience gets to share food (recipes created by Zaidi) and Zaidi's personal story, and to reflect on "issues around identity and... static perceptions of culture". I, personally, am all for food in the theatre: La Mama has provided a couple of memorable nights in which the sensual pleasures of theatre are extended to taste. But somehow, for all its impressive dress, Journeys of Love was a lot less than it promised: sadly, the most interesting aspect was the food itself.

As a theatrical experience it gave us an alienated vision of love, mediated through a text that glosses contradiction and loss. Maybe the first mistake is reproducing a restaurant rather than, say, the environs of a home: this effectively atomises the audience. Zaidi is maître d'hôtel rather than a host, and there is little sense of more than a professional invitation. Zaidi's narrative is spoken through a mic, which is immediately alienating, and begs further the question of doing this kind of show in a large space. I had a couple of interesting conversations with my table mates, but this is the kind of interaction prompted simply by seating strangers for an hour or so at the same table. There wasn't much feeling of a collective audience response.

The text itself is banalised by Zaidi's repeated insistence that all experiences of migration - even the miserable existences of migrant workers in Europe - are "journeys of love". Take a letter, Mr Berger. It's hard not to feel that this show is the ultimate neo-liberal theatrical experience: the lesson is that all differences, even the homicidal conflicts between extremist Hindus and Muslims, can be resolved in an embrace, or through eating interesting food together, or by watching videos of local migrants talking about what it's like to be a migrant. Frankly, Poh's Kitchen on ABC TV does far more to communicate the love of food and cultural heterogenity. This is a tourist's experience of difference.

Pictures: Top: promo image for Double Think; bottom, Journeys of Love and More Love.

Double Think, choregraphed and directed by Byron Perry. Sound design by Luke Smiles, lighting by Benjamin Cisterne. With Kirstie McCracken and Lee Serle. North Melbourne Town Hall, Arts House. Melbourne Festival until October 15.

Journeys of Love and More Love, written, directed and performed by Ali Zaidi. Recipes and videography by Ali Zaidi. Composition and sound design by Andy Pink, lighting and production by Steve Wald, video aditing and animation Daniel Saul and Katerina Athanasopoulos. motiroti at the Arts House Meat Market, Melbourne Festival. Until October 16.

I've had one of those months where writing a sentence - any sentence - feels like I'm trying to sculpt a hammer out of porridge. Or did I just imagine that sometimes the logos floweth like those rivers of wine and honey? Maybe it's a trick of memory, something like the idea that women forget about the pain of childbirth (although that one must surely have been invented by a male gynaecologist whooping it up on laughing gas - I've never spoken to a mother who has said anything of the sort). Surely there must have been some reason I took up the trade of wordsmithing, besides an inability to play world-class tennis or to add up columns of numbers?

So take this as an apologia: I know very well that what follows is a loose and disconnected series of impressions rather than a sober review. Perhaps I can't think properly because my novel keeps calling me and taking some dastardly inner revenge when I don't answer. Perhaps it's just that I need a new brain from the supermarket. When I finish this, I am going to have a bath and a good lie down, and perhaps then I'll remember why I ended up being a writer. God was having a good laugh that day.


You know that things aren't working when it looks difficult, when those sentences still have hammer marks all over them. One of the hallmarks of ability is its invisibility, how it makes skill look like ease. Or so I reflected last week, watching the guys in Lawn lift each other with one hand as if they were made of paper. Goddam it, they made it look as if they were lifting balloons. They crawled up and down walls as if they were cockroaches. They threw themselves around the stage as if their bones were made of rubber. They stuck their heads in chairs and stayed there for what seemed like hours, and didn't suffocate. (Actually, that didn't look easy, it looked very uncomfortable). Afterwards, as they took their bows, you saw the sweat soaking their clothes. And by then you were so enchanted and moved by this extraordinary piece of dance theatre that all you could do was cheer.

Lawn is a collaboration by three Australian men - Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood and Gavin Webber - that is about the relationships between three Australian men in a cold German winter. It was created in Berlin and expanded in their native Brisbane, and has toured internationally to enormous acclaim. And no wonder. This is deeply exciting dance, physically thrilling (and sometimes even distressing in the anxiety you feel for the performers), visually beautiful (an extraordinary collapsible set by Zoe Atkinson) and musically brilliant (Iain Grandage creating a collage of vastly differing styles of music, from achingly lovely cello solos to German heavy metal).

Emotionally - well, emotionally it's all sorts of things. It's a passionate and unabashed exploration of masculinity - its aggression, its lostness, its danger, its tenderness, its hilarity - that makes you realise how exciting the smell of testosterone can be in the theatre. Through the physical language these men create, its wit and tension and brutality, emerges a profound tenderness, a lyrical delicacy and grace that is almost classical in its purity of movement.

The dance begins with the absolutely mundane - one man brushing his teeth, another eating cereal, another vacuuming - in a grotty apartment with thin walls and dodgy pipes. But this mundane reality is full of cracks through which emerge the grotesque, the violent, the beautiful and the funny: cockroaches appear from nowhere and run down a dancer's arms, a wardrobe door opens to reveal a man playing a cello, or a man in lederhosen comes out and plays Waltzing Matilda on an accordion, which is one of the funniest things I've seen on stage. The final image - an extraordinarily moving evocation of homesickness - makes you gasp with its unexpected beauty.


The young company Rogue, which presented three short dances at the Tower Theatre, offers a contrast to Lawn that demonstrates the range of Australian dance. As I saw one immediately after the other, the contrast was marked. Where Lawn is three bodies lost in an infinitely expanding domestic space, Rogue is many bodies crammed into tiny spaces. Lawn is impure dance/theatre, generating a personal, even lyric narrative; Rogue is much more concerned with pure dance, the intricacies of abstract movement. It's marked by a street-smart, pop sensibility, and is a lot of fun.

Byron Perry's A Volume Problem is a witty take on amplification, using two speakers as props. It begins in miniature, a dance of hands on a table-sized stage, and expands into short vignettes punctuated by darkness: flashes of a crowd at a concert, or solos that seem to be interior dances, the inward-directed privacy of the iPod generation. Antony Hamilton's The Counting, choreographed with the dancers, extends the technological imagery to sinister evocations of techno-humanity, with machine-like gestures evolving before an insistent, metronomic beat.

The final dance, Puck, reduced me to uncontrollable giggles: here the dancers are framed by a set by Malthouse in-house designer Anna Cordingley, which pulls on the imagery of shopping centres or games arcades. Another dancer carrying an old-fashioned Streets ice-cream tray roams the audience, distributing various noise-making objects: a bicycle bell, a light sabre, a ridiculously honking horn. Each sound is a command to the dancers, signaling a different routine. When the dancers run out of routine, they simply stop until someone in the audience rings their bell. The dance - which otherwise might continue indefinitely - is structured by a couple of blaring sirens and the lighting states.

Our audience was somewhat shy, which I regret: I would have been waving that light-sabre like a crazy woman, just to see what happened. But even so, as the noises became more varied and the dancers attempted frantically to respond to conflicting signals, an irresistibly funny anarchy began to emerge among the tightly disciplined routines. As its name suggests, Puck is an exploration of mischief, with a touch of the sinister: for all its comedy, the dancers are at the mercy of the audience, driven to please, to answer their commands.


Lucy Guerin's Untrained, presented in the dance-friendly space at the Meatmarket, is another take on command and response. The premise is lucid and simple: four performers, two trained dancers (Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry) and two untrained (visual artists Ross Coulter and Simon Obarzanek), are given a series of tasks, which they perform before an audience. The tasks are listed on pieces of paper laid on the floor, and the performances take place in a small square outlined in the middle of the stage.

It could be the essence of banality, a merely intellectual examination of the differences between levels of performative skill. Indeed, before I saw it, I read this withering review in the Age, which said that the work was simply going over old ground broken in the 1960s, and that although it was "mildly entertaining", Untrained was "ultimately uninteresting". Ouch.

After I had seen the show, this struck me as a rather ungenerous response: as with Two-Faced Bastard, I think you have to work hard to resist the unexpected charm of this show. But the review prompted me do some reading about the post-modern dance that emerged in 1960s New York. Post-modern dance evolved in part from the dance of Merce Cunningham, although it was a reaction to the purities of modern practice. It famously began with an influential series of performances in the Judson Church Hall in Greenwich Village in the early '60s. And yes, Jordan Beth Vincent is quite correct: Untrained is indeed in the same area. Like those performances, this show draws on Dadaist influences, Cagean randomness and task-based activity, and the vernacular of the everyday, using both trained and untrained bodies to examine the nature of performance.

Does this mean Guerin is merely reinventing the wheel? Is it naive to find it engrossing? I'm not so sure. For one thing, you'd have to be absolutely certain that Guerin doesn't know that the wheel exists in the first place. Myself, I'd be taking bets that she is perfectly aware of the traditions from which she is drawing. And also, you'd have to ignore the immediacy of the performances, which engage your attention throughout the show (which seemed a lot shorter than its 90 minutes). I thought of Borges's story about the man who rewrote Cervantes' Don Quixote, and his assertion that, although the second text was exactly the same, word for word, as the original, the newer writing was an entirely different work, because an entirely different time and series of necessities had brought it to fruition. I think something similar pertains here. Only more so, because performance only ever exists in the now.

What emerged from this series of tasks, ranging from the mundane - say your name backwards - to the comic - do a slow-motion fall - was a surprisingly moving process of personal revelation. You would expect the non-dancers to be vulnerable, exposed by their lack of skills when juxtaposed with such skilled bodies as Perry and Hamilton; what you might not expect is the vulnerability opened in the dancers as the visual artists began to exploit their comedic incompetence to charm the audience.

More than anything else, Untrained is four very intimate portraits. Portraiture is an overt theme: during the course of the show the performers drew pictures of each other, as well as speaking to paper sculptures that were self-portraits. The show is almost cubist in the way it opens out differing perspectives of looking (I guess it's no accident that two performers are visual artists) - we are aware of the performers looking at each other as well as us looking at them, and of the differing expectations with which we look.

It demonstrates how revealing movement is, exposing a person's shynesses and extrovert defences as well as their generous expressiveness. And it shows how expressiveness expands through play, opening up privacies of which the performers are not necessarily conscious. A young girl in front of me was enchanted and shook with laughter all the way through it; it was certainly funny, but that transparent comedy was gently underlaid by something else, something profoundly humane, which was much more complex than it seemed.

Lawn: Choreography: Splintergroup; performers: Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood, Gavin Webber; Rehearsal Director: Michelle Ryan; Dramaturgy: Andrew Ross; Musical Composer/Performer: Iain Grandage; Designer: Zoe Atkinson; Lighting Designer: Mark Howett. Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse.

Rogue: A Volume Problem: Choreography: Byron Perry; Composer: Luke Smiles; Set Construction: Anita Holloway. The Counting: Choreography: Antony Hamilton and Rogue; Sound: Panasonic; Costume Designer: Doyle Barrow; lighting design: Frog - Bluebottle 3. Puck: Choreography: Rogue; Costume Design: Doyle Barrow. Dancers: Derrick Amanatidis, Sara Black, Danielle Canavan, Holly Durrant, Laura Levitus, Kathryn Newnham, Harriet Ritchie. Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse.

Untrained: Concept/ Direction: Lucy Guerin, Performers: Ross Coulter, Antony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Byron Perry. Arts House, Meat Market.

Pictures, top to bottom: Lawn; Rogue; Untrained.

Care Instructions by Cynthia Troup, directed by Margaret Cameron. Music by David Young, lighting design by Danny Pettingall. With Jane Bayly, Liz Jones and Caroline Lee. La Mama @ The Courthouse until November 29.

I Like This, choreographed and directed by Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry. Lighting and sound by Antony Hamilton and Byron Perry. Costumes by Paula Levis. With Antony Hamilton, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Byron Perry and Lee Serle. Chunky Move - The Next Move, Chunky Move Studio, until November 29.

O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip ! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread ! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial!

Sometimes it's assumed that the sheer pleasure of playfulness indicates a concomitant lack of seriousness. This makes me think of a Chinese ink drawing I saw many years ago at the old Melbourne Museum, a portrait of an enormously fat Buddhist monk reclining idly on the ground. I have seldom seen such knowingness so economically expressed in a few brushstrokes. He was looking out with an expression of profound, unmalicious mischief, his face luminous with some deep, mysterious joy: he seemed to hold within him a bubbling fountain of laughter on the verge of erupting. I know just about everything, the monk seemed to be saying. But, in the face of eternity, human knowledge is a huge joke. So pass me the rice wine and the dumplings...

At the other end of the scale - or maybe not - is the seriousness of children at play. For children, play is crucial means of discovering their worlds, of beginning to grapple with the things that baffle or frighten or fascinate them. The truthful aspect of the oft-cited (and pejorative) description of artists as "childish" is that artists have never stopped playing. Why, after all, are plays called plays? And this playfulness is particularly clear in these two pieces of theatre, one a dance, one a beautiful realisation of a poetic text.