Disagreeable Object

This is the third time that Disagreeable Object has had a Melbourne outing. It needs a lot more - as audiences love this tiny-capacity capsule of theatre/dance experience. With only a small number of viewers allowed in at any one time, it’s an intimate and very special 33 minute experience. Goulish, macabre, funny and pedantic all at once, its construction is flawless - a perfect integration of action, light, space, character and movement. 


Conceived by Michelle Heaven, its inspiration is old films, and that is essentially what it feels like - a silent movie come to life.  It is a work that audiences literally enter into. A black box contains a seating booth opposite a square-framed, deep stage. While viewers are intimate with the action, they are equally far away, as visual distance is constantly morphed and distorted through the immaculate design of Ben Cobham from Bluebottle that sharply magnifies and shrinks forms. 

Michelle Heaven. Disagreeable Object. 

And who would have thought that the humble green pea could be the catalyst for so much activity? It’s a compulsive cat and mouse game between the diminutive Heaven and the hulking Brain Lucas who taunt and torment each other in a quest for more of the green stuff. They are ideal foils - She - tiny body in gothic black dress with huge bustle, emphasising an especially round derriere. He - a lumbering, Lurch-like giant in dark suit, his bald head and pale hound dog face almost too large for his blocky body. 


Shadow play and lighting highlight the size descrepancy between Heaven and Lucas to the extreme. Spatial depth is constantly toyed with - Sometimes things are flat, other times, deep and narrow. The opening image of Heaven hunched in a tiny chair, manically munching on a pod of peas is intensely odd. It later becomes doubly-strange when the barreling Lucas sits in the same kid-size chair - his massive knees tucked up into his chin, his face resting on his thighs. Disagreeable Object is chock-full of these sort of set-ups where visual design convolutes and extends the figures while the sound design (by Bill McDonald) emphasises every teeny-tiny action. Heaven washes her hands under a faucet, meticulously rubbing her hands as she stretches forward her torso in a crisp silhouette that makes her body look much taller than it is. Sounds of dripping water accompany her every shuffle. Lucas loudly gulps tiny peas and physicalises them ricocheting through his torso. 


Only seldomly do the pair break out into short frenzies of choreographed dance steps and these serve to emphasis the game of deception and tease at play. 

Disagreeable Object is a rigorous concept piece that requires meticulous attention to detail and Heaven and Lucas's total ability to embody their characters. The whole work never, not even for a second, loses its focus. The duo's command performances combined with the interplay of Cobham's design and  McDonald's rustles, creaks and scuffles makes Disagreeable Object a picture-perfect treat. 


It's not a sugary sweet morsel, but it is surprisingly appetizing. Hilariously unusual, anachronistic and ever-so enticing, Disagreeable Object might come back for fourths if we ask with a pretty please. 

Disagreeable Object

16 - 19 March 2011
Meat Market, Arts House

In Glass

Melbourne has not had the opportunity to see much of Sydney-based Narelle Benjamin. She was a founding member of Chunky Move and performed in their early Melbourne seasons. Over the past decade, she has been steadily choreographing - often for dance film, collaborating extensively with film director Cordelia Beresford.  In Glass, which Malthouse Theatre is presenting as part of Dance Massive, is her first full length choreographic work. It premiered in Spring Dance 2010 in Sydney. Within it, Benjamin's interest in filmic possibilities is clear, as is her yoga practice that artfully weaves within the low-lying choreography.  

In Glass is a two-hander for Kristina Chan and Paul White.  Benjamin could not find more fitting dancers. On a pure brute-strength level, they are powerhouses in all directions - upright, upside down and on the side, but they are also both incredibly supple, sinuous and curvaceously expansive with a weightiness of presence. 

Kristina Chan and Paul White. Photo by Regis Lansic.

Darkly-lit, floor-bound, intertwined, solitary - the action of In Glass is a constant play between being absorbed as a couple and being a self-aware individual. 


Benjamin describes the work as being about states of unconsciousness, altered realities and mythical places.  Film is probably one of the best mediums for this exploration and the cinematic elements (visual design by Samuel James) that spread across and around movable, reflexive panels are well-realised. They dance within, behind and on top of the dancers and reflect, multiply and disembody them in the projections. The vast range of cinematic devices blend seamlessly with the physicality of Chan and White.  


Mirrored screens on three sides hem in the stage. White and Chan glide these around, trapping themselves into smaller spaces. They shine torches; they blend into and out of the often eerie video work; they linger in periods of self-absorbed reverie. White strangles himself with two mirror discs, hungrily licking his own reflection. Chan watches her video doppelganger run through a green field. Their two faces artfully melt into one on screen.  It’s always dark, (lighting design by Karen Norris) with accents punctuated by the flick of a torch or a reflection created off the silvery screens. The symbolism is everywhere - the encroaching mirrors, the constant looking at self, the bodies write large and small and melded with trees/forests in the video; the kaleidoscopic views of the curves on White’s chiseled torso or the way that White and Chan roll head to head, neck to neck, shoulder to shoulder in some sort of symbiotic relationship. 

Kristina Chan and Paul White. Photo by Regis Lansic. 

Bare flesh, rippling limbs - it's narcissism writ large, but continually undercut by the desire for another. The duets are often floor bound - they tie themselves into human knots, then break away and hit an inverted yoga posture. A sideways standing leg splay is just a split second until it morphs into a more organic sequence of movement. 

Spurned on by Huey Benjamin's sound score,  In Glass isn’t cool or detached -  it’s totally embodied and fleshy - in the choreography, the film, the set.  It’s an aesthetic that White and Chan seem comfortably at home in (more than once I thought of White in Meryl Tankard’s The Oracle in which he was a similarly imposing, ego-obsessed force.) 


The saturation of all the pulsing elements could easily push In Glass too far into heavy handed territory and while there are moments when the excess of it all overwhelms the honesty of the movement, overall, it's a powerful and bewitching experience.   

In Glass

Beckett Theatre at Malthouse Theatre

15 - 20 March 2011

Dance Massive kicks off with Sunstruck

Trevor Patrick. Sunstruck. 

After months of anticipation Dance Massive is finally here.With 20 dance shows/events as well as the weekend-long National Dance Forum and an industry day crammed into two weeks, I, unfortunately won't be making it to everything. I can't even if I want to - the National Dance Forum is already sold out! (There is a waiting list though - so get on it if you'd like a chance to still go.) I'll be seeing a lot though and will post prompt reviews of everything on this site.

Monday night is an unlikely night to start a festival, but the first show kicked off tonight. And you only have until Wednesday to check it out. It's Sunstruck by Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham. It premiered in Melbourne in the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2008 and was presented in a huge, freezing shed down at the Docklands. Now it is being transported to Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall. I'd bet that the cavernous, cool nature of the work still remains, even in a smaller space. You will have to let me know, as I won't be able to catch this outing. Here is my review of Sunstruck from 2008.

Herbertson and Cobham have a long history of collaboration and their works are renowned for their depth, attention to theatrical detail and the overall environments that they design. Herbertson takes credit for devising and directing and the design and light are attributed to Cobham. There's no way that you could separate out their individual contributions through - the result is a united and deeply-considered vision.

Herbertson is deservedly regarded as one of the seminal figures in contemporary dance in Australia and I'd need much longer than a blog entry to do justice to her career. It's fitting that her work was also represented in the inaugural Dance Massive in 2009. (Morphia Series is another collaboration with  Cobham.)

Dance Massive is Coming....

The Malthouse Theatre launched its 2011 season yesterday. Along with all the great theatre that new artistic director Marion Potts has planned are four dance shows which are all part of the 2011 Dance Massive Festival. Along with Dancehouse, Arts House, and Ausdance, the Malthouse is a producer of Dance Massive. 

Dance Massive began in 2009 as a festival for Australian contemporary dance and was so successful that the plan is for a bi-annual event. Shows range from small to medium size and the artists presented are all of a very high calibre. 2009 artists included Lucy Guerin Inc, Helen Herbertson, Russell Dumas and Splintergroup as well as younger choreographers like Rogue Collective.  

Based on what's been announced so far at the Malthouse (the full Dance Massive program will be revealed in early December), the 2011 program is going to be pretty exciting - there's new work, recent work and a remount of a significant production. 

Connected. Photo by John Drysdale. 

The new work is a Chunky Move premiere called Connected. It's a collaboration with American kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin. Margolin is creating a huge sculpture of moving parts that will be attached to the five dancers. Music, lighting, sculpture and dance will be highly connected, with all elements triggering each other. 

Faker. Photo by Heidrun Lour.

In a totally different vein, Gideon Obarzanek, artistic director of Chunky Move will present his solo, Faker - more a personal expose about creating artwork than a dance piece in itself. He presented it in Sydney this year and it looks really interesting. 

In Glass by choregrapher Narelle Benjamin also has a connection to Chunky Move. Benjamin danced with the company in its early days when it first moved to Melbourne in the late 1990s to take up the post as Victoria's flagship contemporary dance company. I still remember her fiesty performance as the knife-weilding go-go dancer in Bonehead. She has worked with just about every major company in Australia as well as having success as a dance film maker. For In Glass, her first full length production, she's collaborating with award-winnning dancers Kristina Chan and Paul White. Both are phenomenoal performers, having worked extensively with Tanya Leidtke and Australian Dance Theatre, among many others. 

Amplification. Photo by Jeff Busby.

Finally - and another connection to the late 1990s -  is a remount of Phillip Adams' Amplification. I should admit here that I have a special connection to Amplification - I wrote about it in my MA back in 2000. It was not only Adams' first major work after moving back to Melbourne after a decade in New York, it was also the inaugural work for his company BalletLab, that now, over a decade on, has an extensive and extremely diverse repertoire.  

Even though Adams' dance making practice has moved in all sorts of directions since Amplification,  the work is a great example of Adams' ideas about the relationship of ballet to contemporary performance, his interest in distorting/reinventing ballet technique and his ability to zealously research a dark topic and re-fashion it into something utterly unique. 

Check out www.malthousetheatre.com.au for more details about these shows or become an e-subscriber to Dance Massive on www.dancemassive.com.au and get all the latest updates and articles about the festival. 

Dance Massive runs 15 - 27 March 2011.