Less, so the conventional wisdom goes, is more. Like most truisms it isn't always true, but it's a handy rule of thumb that Narelle Benjamin might have heeded when creating In Glass, a multiply-imaged extravaganza which played last week in the intimate environs of the Beckett Theatre as part of Dance Massive. The work is choreographed for two extraordinary dancers, Paul White (whose classical purity animated Meryl Tankard's Oracle last year) and Kristina Chan: and I can't help thinking that their explosive chemistry might have been enough on its own.


Benjamin has created an erotic duet in which the masculine and feminine flow together in mirror images of movement or separate in tense conflicts of difference (it's notable that the male is most active, the female most passive). The dance emerges from darkness, exploring a liminal space of dream and unconscious desire: White first enters the blacked-out stage with a torch, seeking Chan's prone figure with its dim beam. The choreography explores complex motions of collapse and restoration, of sensual connection and sharp separation, and its focus on individual parts of the body - arms, hands, legs, or at one point White's Apollonian torso - suggests the fragmenting nature of eroticism itself.

White and Chan are riveting: their precision and fluidity is astounding and moving. But the experience is overlaid by a storm of visual stimuli: the dancers are surrounded not only by reflections in the mirrors that are the main feature of the design, but also by projections and even backlit movement from behind the mirrors. Shadows, endlessly multiplying bodies, shifts of perspective and videoed images collide in a visual excess that begins to have a diminishing impact, and at last distracts from the dance itself.

In Glass seems to explore a Lacanian notion of love or erotic attraction as a form of infantile narcissism, parsed through a sub-Jungian exploration of myth, notably Eve and Narcissus. This is reinforced by the videos, which are surprisingly banal - a girl in an orchard eating an apple, broken glass, a tree of knowledge made of limbs, rippling water. There are undeniably striking moments - White holding two oval mirrors, kissing his grotesque reflections - but these, and whatever ideas were driving them, become blurred in the image overload.

Around 15 minutes before the dance finished - a moment where we revisited the Edenic apple orchard - the dance seemed quite suddenly to run out of ideas, which made the final sequences feel very long. This might be a problem with dramatic shaping rather than the choreography itself. Still, I can't help wondering what the dance might have been like without all the extras. It reminded me a little of some theatre in the 1990s, when multi-media was a novelty in itself, rather than another theatrical language.

On Thursday night I eschewed Dance Massive for These Are The Isolate, a show by the young company Mutation Theatre. This was one of two works that Mutation Theatre premiered during last year's Fringe: I saw their other piece, an adaptation of Shaun Tan's The Arrival at Docklands that demonstrated their energy and potential, but missed this one. And this was the show that garnered the praise and prizes, including the Theatre Works award which led to this production.

These Are The Isolate, written by Katy Warner (who also performs) is a text that, rather like Falk Richter's explorations of corporate capitalism or Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life, tracks the collapse of the individual self in an alienated social world. A man (Tim Wotherspoon) is seeking a promotion, which is denied because he is married. Or because he isn't married. But is he married? Is there a child? Has his wife left him, or is she dead, or is she present? All the possibilities are presented as undecided until this short duet for voices reaches its climax, whereupon we witness a singular reality that collapses all the fantasies that have animated the play.

The writing is seriously promising, witty, concrete and detailed, but it doesn't quite match its ambitions. I regretted the urge towards significant narrative that undermines the suspension of its best moments. It might have been a far stronger play, and have headed in less expected directions, if Warner could have stuck to the banality of the crisis it was exploring and resisted the temptation of dramatic flourishes. But there's no doubting the promise it reveals, especially in the bold poetic of its theatrical attack.

Marcel Dorney's production effectively exploits the cavernous darkness of Theatre Works to evoke a shifting inner world, with Katie Sfetkidis's stern lighting picking out or concealing the performers in an abstract theatrical reality. Mutation Theatre has been marked as one to watch for the past year or so, and rightly so. Well worth checking out.

Picture: Kristina Chan and Paul White in In Glass.

In Glass, choreographed by Narelle Banjamin. Composed by Huey Benjamin, visual design Samuel James, costumes design by Tess Scofield, lighting design by Karen Norris. With Kristina Chan and Paul White. Dance Massive, Malthouse Theatre. Closed.

These Are The Isolate, by Katy Warner, directed by Marcel Dorney. Lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Tim Wotherspoon. Devised and performed by Katy Warner and Tim Wotherspoon. Theatre Works, until March 27.

Dance Massive is now in full swing, offering the kind of fare that means I am constantly kicking myself (an interesting athletic feat) for not seeing everything on the program. Altogether, I'll get to six shows over the fortnight, which is not exactly insubstantial: but such is the diversity of practice on offer - from film, improvisation and sound art to more conventional theatrical performance - that those who get to the whole festival will gain an enviable overview of the vital currents now rippling across Australian contemporary dance. Well, a gal's gotta know her limitations, and mine are intransigent at the moment. Below are meditations on a couple of the shows I did see this week.


One of the pleasures of this festival is the remounts. I missed Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham's Sunstruck at the 2008 Melbourne Festival, though I didn't miss the buzz. Those who saw its first incarnation tell me that this remounting at North Melbourne Town Hall is substantially different from its premiere in a huge shed at Docklands, but for this kind of performance, which is intensely sensitive to the space it inhabits, that's completely unsurprising.

Its music and movement are improvised, although clearly within solid structures, and the dance exists in that liminal state between sleep and awareness - not dream so much as reverie. When the audience enters, we are immediately made welcome with an offer of tea or sake before being directed to a circle of wooden chairs that glows luminously within an edgeless, smoke-enhanced darkness. The chairs are placed within a circular rail, along which is run the major lighting source for the show, a rig holding a huge sodium-coloured light covered with venetian slats.

It begins in silence, with Trevor Patrick stepping with a delicate, even shy hesitancy before us. At this point the lighting is from above, so everything is softly illuminated, the dancer and the audience. Immediately you notice the expressiveness of Patrick's hands, and you become aware of your own gaze on the dancer, which seems to touch him as the light does. He speaks: "No rain. Still." Then darkness, and the rattling noise of the rig being dragged behind the chairs, and the sodium light comes on. Its effect is like the sun seen through closed eyelids, intense but tempered by darkness, a dream of a harsh sun perhaps recalled in fever. Sunstroke.

Patrick is joined by Nick Sommerville, who seats himself among the audience. They speak again, but this time it is half-heard nonsense, dissolving into stylised laughter that turns into weeping. Then, from out of the darkness, there is the scrape of a cello. (The darkness in the hall was so tangible that I didn't see the musicians - Tamil Rogeon and Tim Blake - when I entered, and this came as a surprise.) The dance shifts between solos, where the other dancer sits among the audience, and duets, and gradually builds up its intensity, weaving deftly through the music and sound and light, responsive and richly allusive. It moves through moments that seem intensely private - the cradling of a child, gestures of affection - to others that touch on public representation of gender: an exaggeratedly feminine step, an overtly masculine pose, masculine conflict, maternal poses - that feed into and transform each other.

A lot of the movement, especially in the rippling delicacy of Patrick's hands, seems to spring from the stylised representations of Asian theatre, themes reinforced by motifs in the music (Tamil Rogeon and Tim Blake): there was a particularly beautiful moment where Patrick mimed wringing out water from long hair that could have come straight from a Kabuki performance. At another I was suddenly thrown into a bullring and found myself thinking of Lorca's great poem, Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias: "The wounds were burning like suns / at five in the afternoon". But, as with the lighting, these images are all liminal, holding themselves on the other side of bald representation: they are allusions that hover on the threshold of perception, winding through the shifting experience of the whole.

Livia Ruzic's soundscape is an important part of this experience: the musicians move unseen around the space, so that the cello or violin emanate from unexpected places, making us aware of spatial perspectives beyond the circle of sight. The music is punctuated by ambient sound - seascapes, birds carolling, subliminal electronic sounds - that enrich the texture of the entire piece. This one will stay with me: it's an exquisitely staged, focused work that offers an enthralling immersive experience.

Where Sunstruck is all darkness, the mind ranging across interior reverie, Luke George's NOWNOWNOW (closing tonight at Dancehouse) is all light and surface. This is an unambiguously joyous experience, in the mysterious ways that dance that attempts to focus on the absolute presence of performers and audiences often is (I'm thinking here of Les Ballets C de la B or Jerome Bel). This makes it intensely difficult to describe at all satisfactorily, because there is almost no there there: as they say, and it's very true of this work, you had to be there.

One of the characteristics of this kind of dance is an abolition of barriers between the audience and the performers. This is evident as soon as you enter the theatre: from the moment you step through the door, shoeless as requested, you are walking on white carpet. The carpet stretches the length of the stage and covers the stepped rostrum where the audience is seated, explicitly embracing us all in the same space. The whole is enclosed by black curtains, and we are all brightly illuminated. In the right corner of the stage, near the audience, is a small television with its back to us, and backstage are a couple of big amplifiers. Otherwise the stage is empty.

As the audience enters, the three dancers - Kristy Ayre, Luke George and Timothy Harvey - are on stage doing nothing in particular, dressed in the most absurd costumes I have ever seen. They look as if they have raided an opshop full of Xena the Warrior Princess dress ups - plastic greaves, velcro armour, yellow shorts, lime-green codpieces, toy Indian head-dress. It's impossible not to wonder what it can all possibly portend. Then, once the dance proper begins, each dancer strips, dresses in plain-coloured tracksuit pants and shirts, and puts the costumes away.

Okay, first set of expectations thrown away. What follows is a series of explorations in which the dancers continually focus in different ways on the bare literality of what is occurring on stage. The performances are key here, because there is nothing else. These dancers, in their physical skills and, crucially, in their ability to merely be on stage, which is much harder than it sounds, are impeccable. The only narrative here is the dance itself, which shifts from complex abstract movement to gestures drawn from aerobic exercise or the mundane minutae of, for example, people watching and responding to television.

They begin by shouting in perfect chorus all the rhymes they can think of for NOW: cow bow frau miaow and so on, an explosion of Dadaist nonsense that sets the tenor for the rest of the dance. At one point all the dancers do energetic star jumps until they are exhausted, and stand, panting, until they have caught their breath. At another George approaches an audience member in the front row and gives her a headset, which she puts on. We can hear the whisper of the sound, but not what it's saying. She walks onto the stage, obeying recorded instructions that become part of the dance.

Or again, all three dancers put on glossy black wigs backwards, so their faces are concealed, and perform a hilarious and somehow sinister minimalist version of a Supremes stage routine. Or they are seated, watching television, making fragmentary, mundane statements that become like prefab phrases repeated with different expressiveness through each performer. Towards the end, they shout out what they are doing and perceiving: BLACK! TEXTURE! SHADOW! DIAGIONAL! ABSTRACTION!!

The effect of all these attacks on the present is an increasing buoyancy and joyousness. George's explicit intention is the exploration of the present moment, especially the complexities and contradictions of spontaneity when it collides with the consciousness of a structured work of art. In depriving us of narrative, sense or expectation, NOWNOWNOW opens up a glorious sense of liberation. Dadaist post-post-modern dance? I don't know. Whatever it is, it went by in a flash: it effortlessly engrosses your entire attention. It's very funny, provoking almost constant ripples of laughter, but underneath that is a sense of generosity and mutual trust that is mysteriously profound. Get there if you can.

Picture: Sunstruck. Photo: Heidrun Lohr

Sunstruck, by Helen Herbertson (devisor, director, sound concept) and Ben Cobham (design and lighting). Soundscape by Livia Ruzic. Performed by Trevor Patrick and Nick Sommerville, musicians Tamil Rogeron and Tim Blake. Dance Massive, Arts House North Melbourne Town Hall, closed.

NOWNOWNOW, choregraphed by Luke George. Design by Bejamin Cisterne, dramaturgy by Martyn Coutts, costumes by Ede Strong and cast, music by Glass Candy. With Kristy Ayre, Timothy Harvey and Luke George. Dance Massive, Dancehouse until March 20.

"What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! - There is nothing like dancing after all. - I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished societies."

"Certainly, Sir; - and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world. - Every savage can dance."

It's not surprising that Jane Austen's Mr Darcy, a product of a literate, aristocratic and above all language-centred society, should feel discomfort with dancing. In his snooty dismissal of its value to civilised life is an unspoken fear: he quite rightly suspects that there is an innate quality in dance that subverts the realities which language seeks to legislate - the ordered layers of the class system, for example, or the rational syntax of an ordered (colonial) society in which everyone knows his or her place, itself rigidly predetermined by race and birth.

Although we're a long way from 19th century England, dance still holds that subversive possibility. Partly it's the inescapable eroticism of dance, its insistence on the physical reality of the human body. Dance imbricates the certainties of language with its own language of gestural ambiguities. No matter how pure and effortless a movement might seem to be, those watching are still aware of the dancer's weight landing on a stage, the heaviness of a body in tension with its dynamic flight. Even more insistently than in the theatre, the metaphor of dance grounds itself on literal fact: the body on stage performs, and the body off-stage watches, responds, and generates the multiple narratives that individual imagination brings to performance.

This might seem to be the absolute basis of performance, the irreducible earth from which all else grows. But a lot of contemporary dance seems to zero in on even these assumptions, holding up the relationship between performer and audience to relentless and fascinating scrutiny. Inert - a collaboration between dancer /choreographers Simon Ellis and Shannon Bott, designer Scott Mitchell, sound designer David Corbet and videographer Cormac Lally - is a radical example.

Inert is performed by two dancers for an audience of two, which is interesting enough as a proposition. My curiosity was piqued still further when I was asked for my height (why could they possibly need that detail?) I confess to feeling slightly nervous beforehand as I waited in the anteroom with my co-audient at North Melbourne Town Hall, knowing already that this would probably be a uniquely naked experience. After all, when you are part of an audience, you are - or at least, you feel that you are - invisible. As John Berger points out, the gaze is a powerful authority. What happens to that authority, that entitled sense of selfhood, when the artwork looks back, and it can't be looking at anyone except you?

Even so, as the usher led me into the room where the performance took place, there was also an sense of immense privilege. Effectively, a dancer was to dance for me alone. It was like being the Sun King (if you can imagine the North Melbourne Town Hall as a kind of Versailles...oh, never mind...) This mixture of contradictory feelings, disempowerment and privilege, was made more complex still as we were each led to vertical metal slabs, perhaps two metres apart. These looked like nothing so much as operating tables, with footrests on which we were asked to stand. Then we were both given cushions to place behind our heads and headphones to cover our ears. From then on, we were uniquely alone: for the rest of the performance, I was aware of everybody in the room except my co-audience member.

The effect of all this preparation was twofold: I was wholly passive, my arms hanging down, my eyes directed forward. It seemed impossible to move (and there was no desire to, either). It was almost infantalising, like being in hospital. At the same time, I was acutely aware of the weight and shape of my own body, and of the dancer before me (Simon Ellis), who began his dance as an ambient electronic soundscape began to fill my ears. Mainly, as if my gaze was riveted in front of me, I watched Ellis, although I was aware of Shannon Bott dancing the same moves. It was almost as if it was discourteous not to watch "my" dancer all the time, although my gaze flickered across the room. For their part, the dancers performed solely for their chosen audient, except for one moment where each acknowledged the other, glancing across the room.

For the first few minutes I felt very exposed. I was sensitised to the weight of the smallest gesture - my own as well as the dancer's. Should I meet the dancer's eyes? Or was that presuming too far on a relationship that was, after all, between strangers? Was I trying too hard not to look self-conscious, too obviously breathing to relax myself? But after a while, I lost that self-consciousness and found a deeper awareness not mediated by shyness; I became absorbed in the dance itself. My sense of self-presence was subtly alienated and sharpened by the headphones, which provided a kind of privacy; and yet at the same time I was unable to forget the weight of my body, that I took up as much space as the dancers.

Then Ellis approached me, and there was a brief moment of something rather like terror - was he going to touch me? (Why should that be terrifying? Or was it pleasure? Or both?) But no, he grasped the slab and began to push it very slowly backwards, until I was aware that there was a screen above my face, less than a metre above me, and that images were flickering across it.

These were intimate images of Ellis: close-ups of his hands, filmed so you could see the grainy texture of the skin, or of his face, smiling at me (no, not smiling at me, smiling at the camera, at someone else, at some other time). They were accompanied by a voice whispering urgently into my ears, speaking obliquely of a relationship, all of it addressed to a "you", that might have been "me", although I knew it wasn't, it was someone else. But it was said to me all the same. This was, interestingly, the most intimate part of the performance: the filmed images permitted me a proper invisibility and distance, I suppose. And now my body was floating in space, in some other dimension, fully aware, fully relaxed. The words became more insistent, even a little hostile, and then I was looking at an image of feet hanging, two shiny black shoes suspended above a skirting board, and for a moment I thought, oh no, this is death, he has hanged himself; but then I realised it was an extreme slomo shot of Ellis jumping.

Finally, when the monologue had finished, Ellis slowly turned the slab to the vertical again. This time I was wholly aware of my changing centre of gravity, of the heaviness of my feet and the way the organs inside my body shifted. There was a brief dance, and then the lights went out. I wasn't sure if I should clap - one person clapping in an empty room can seem much louder than a whole auditorium - and was led out into the world. During the performance the skies had burst and big fat drops of rain were falling outside the window. I was so disoriented, a feeling that persisted for at least an hour, that I thought at first that the sound of the raindrops was another performance. Which perhaps it was. God's own installation.

What stays with me is the enormous tact of this performance: it was an act of radical destabilisation that was never anything but gentle. It demonstrated that intimacy is, more than anything else, the act of noticing details, of sharpening the gaze from the general to the acutely particular. When I walked out, I ruminated on the final words: This is not real. Of course it was real, in the same ways, and with the same contradictions, that the whole world is real, and the intimacy wasn't wholly false. But of course it was a fiction as well.

It's hard to think of a greater contrast to Inert than Chunky Move's spectacular Mortal Engine. Unusually for Gideon Obarzanek, who has been the among the most restlessly experimental minds attacking the question of spatial relationships between audience and performers, Mortal Engine is a straight proscenium arch show, with the audience front-on to a steeply raked stage, that is itself framed within the darkened space of a theatre. So far, one might think, so conventional.


But of course, Chunky Move is never that straightforward. Mortal Engine is in fact a continuation of Obarzanek's collaboration with the technical magician Frieder Weiß, who designed the interactive system that drives the light and sound in this show. The first fruit of their work was the solo dance Glow, a lyrical gem that evolved disturbing and beautiful choreographies of body and light. Glow, performed on a square mat in what was effectively a boxing ring, had a visceral intimacy and elegance of form that is here opened out, with phenomenal sensual success if not without a concomitant loss, into spectacle.

The radical alienation of Mortal Engine begins before the performance starts, in the low lighting of the auditorium. It is dark enough to fool the eyes, for individual faces to be thrown into relief by the yellow light against pools of blackness. In stark contrast to Inert, the audience is invisible, hidden in shadow. The dancers emerge from this shadow like primeval life forms creeping out of the id, falling down the steep face of the stage in their self-generated pools of light and shadow.

The show's dream-like feeling is underlined by a series of almost domestic sequences that punctuate the dance. A couple seem to be lying in a double bed (actually a vertical wall that rises from the foot of the set), turning in the blind, clumsy intimacy of sleep. The scenes seem like those infrared films taken of sleeping people, and carry a similar sense of voyeuristic invasiveness, except that as they move strange things happen - in one sequence they writhe away from gelatinous shadows, with an amplified noise like damp sticking plaster, and in another they are possessed by a field of electric energy, which explodes out of their bodies in a visible field.

Mortal Engine is, as its title indicates, a choreography of dualities - male and female, waking and dream, self and other, flesh and machine, light and shadow - moving in a constant state of flux and tension. Most of it is characterised by ambiguity: in this world, a dancer can "throw" light just as he or she throws a shadow. But at other times images evolve with a sinister directedness: near the beginning, a dancer is menaced by a many-legged shadow, a humanoid mass that swallows her and from which she fights free, only to be swallowed again. In another, a woman lies on top of a man, pinning down his every movement, his shadow blotted out by hers.

The vivifying sense of tension is missing in a sequence that is pure light show. It features spectacular sound-sensitive graphics but, without the complexity of the human body, they remain just a retinal explosion. It's frenetically brilliant, but lacks the visceral connection that otherwise dramatically emphasises the emotional textures - including the alienations - of Obarzanek's choreography. The danger of spectacle is, of course, that it remains merely spectacle.

There are sequences that are blindingly beautiful - dancers moving across the white stage as little flecks of shadow fall down from their gestures, like trails of confetti, or two dancers moving through grids of light that move chaotically where their bodies touch. And the final laser sequence, in which dancers control the lighting with their arms, carves the auditorium into strange fluid chambers defined by green light. After all this distancing, this ocular estrangement, we are fleetingly in a small room with the dancer, enclosed by rippling walls of darkness. It's deeply unsettling, at once intimate and alien. As if, as it almost seemed to be in the beginning, the dance emerges from our own dreaming.

Top: Simon Ellis in Inert. Photo: Nat Cursio; Bottom: Charmene Yap in Mortal Engine. Photo: Andrew Curtis.

Dance Massive:

Inert, choreographed and performed by Shannon Bott and Simon Ellis, designed by Scott Mitchell, sound by David Corbet, videography/editing by Cormac Lally. North Melbourne Town Hall until March 15.

Mortal Engine, directed and choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek, interactive system design Frieder Weiss, laser and sound artist Robin Fox, set design by Richard Dinnen and Gideon Obarzanek, lighting by Damien Cooper. Dancers (rotating): Kristy Ayre / Sara Black / Amber Haines / Antony Hamilton / Marnie Palomares / Lee Serle / James Shannon / Adam Synnott / Charmene Yap. Chunky Move @ the Malthouse Theatre, closed.