Theatre review: Mortal Engine

Mortal Engine. Chunky Move. Director and Choreographer Gideon Obarzanek; Interactive System Designer Frieder Weiss; Laser and Sound Artist Robin Fox; Composer Ben Frost; Costume Designer Paula Lewis; Lighting Designer Damien Cooper; With Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, Marnie Palomares, Lee Serle, James Shannon, Adam Synott, Jorijn Vriesendorp. The Merlyn Theatre at the Malthouse, Melbourne until 13 March, then Sydney Theatre, 5–15 May, 2010.

The wildly contrasting, and often conflicting, creative disciplines of dance, theatre, cinema, multimedia and visual art are almost impossible to wrangle into one cohesive whole; and if Chunky Move's ambitious Mortal Engine doesn't quite manage to triumph over the fourth wall, it's certainly not through want of trying. When it does work, it is truly something to behold: a spectacular fusion of forms to which we find ourselves connected – almost transcendentally – like our pulse. When it doesn't, it's never less than a fantastic experiment in dire need of a purpose; other than being one hell of a multimedia show loosely constructed from all sorts of technical wizardry, powered by Ben Frost's magnificently formidable soundscape and interrupted by occasional choreographic flourishes.

A large white screen lies at an almost impossible (to dance on, anyway) angle on the stage … as though a cinema screen has been tilted to a thirty-something degree angle from the floor. It's an intoxicating prospect; and the first thought is something along the lines of "how are the dancers going to dance on that thing?" But with striking power, strength, precision and startling elasticity, they do. The extremes that these faultless bodies cannot reach are flawlessly assumed by the stunning projected multimedia elements on, and practically through the screen, that create a trance-inducing, kaleidoscopic surface that explores the world of shadows, shapes, metaphysical extensions of touch and, at times, quite miraculously, the dancers' very souls. It is finger-tip exactedness; and only the very few moments when the dancers are lit by traditional spotlights from above, are the tender, uncomplicated gestures of rare, poignant intimacy.

Mortal Engine, however, also continues the increasingly exhaustible trend of contemporary dance projects relying on the visual dynamics and vocabulary of multimedia. Meryl Tankard's The Oracle (recently also in the Merlyn Theatre) began with a very long multimedia presentation that had me looking sideways at my companion and wondering whether we'd actually come to a dance performance or a video installation. When one is in the honourable position of having the opportunity to see as many shows as reviewers are, it all starts to resemble an extreme kind of over-reaction to the limitless possibilities that multimedia offers. At worst, it's a dangerous statement about the limits of purely choreographic adventure. At best, it's an exciting exploration of form. The awkward questions, however, remain: is contemporary dance experiencing some kind of identity crisis? Or are multimedia and contemporary dance inexorably linked in what is, increasingly, a marriage of pure convenience?

I know reviewers are not meant to speculate on what 'might have been', but the nagging doubt about how much more involving the experience of Mortal Engine might have been in a found space, as opposed to a theatre, continue. The chief doubt (among the many) I have about this work, is that it steadfastly defies (and denies) both genre and theatrical (as in four-walled) conventions; including its dispensing with everything but the fundamentals of a narrative. Creative artists dispense with story at their peril; risking, instead, the reduction of, and requisite alienation from, the extent to which we engage with, and share in, the rewards of the performance. While there are certainly some memorable highpoints in Mortal Engine, including some sensational elevations (from not only the dancers, but also the set), and a furiously breath-taking male solo across the screen's entire surface, it ends up being a purely, if hypnotic, observational experience.

We spend a great deal of time, too, wondering and marvelling at how on earth it's all happening. But at some point, however, the dominant curiosity becomes – and remains – "Why?", not "How?". Or maybe it's as simple as "Why not?" You decide … because perhaps to Mortal Engine's unending credit, I can't. And that has been its greatest gift.

This review was commissioned and published by Stage Whispers @
www.stagewhispers.com.au

Review: Black Marrow

Black Marrow, Chunky Move and The Melbourne International Arts Festival. Direction, Choreography and Concept by Erna Ómarsdóttir and Damien Jalet; Set and Costume Design by Alexandra Mein; Lighting Design by Niklas Pajanti; Original Music and Sound Design by Ben Frost featuring Oren Ambarchi; Sound Design/Operator Byron Scullin. In collaboration with, and performed by, Sara Black, Paulo Castro, Julian Crotti, Alisdair Macindoe, Carlee Mellow and James Shannon. The CUB Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne until 24 October.

Dance, perhaps more than any other creative discipline, has to work exceptionally hard to define, and maintain, its contemporary relevance in an increasingly cynical, impatient, overloaded and (dis)connected society: such is the burden of expectation and borrowed observation that increasingly litters the everyday dialogue throughout Melbourne's currently unrestrained creative democracy.

Black Marrow opens against Alexandra Mein's intriguingly spare vision of a post-apocalyptic wasteland (simply, if later counter-intuitively, lit by Mr Pajanti): huge sheets of black plastic providing an instantly recognisable garbage dump. Gradually, shape-shifting bodies scurry underneath what turns out to be a huge piece of black latex covering the stage. Grunting, heaving, fearful and desperate angular 'creatures' meet centrestage before scurrying off to the periphery again. It is a masterstroke: and in a spine-tingling coup de theatre, the near-naked dancers are revealed to us as the entire black latex floor covering is stripped from the stage and out of sight in a heartbeat.

I hold my breath for the stunning pieces of isolation (I have never seen shoulder blades isolated to such powerful effect – at one with Mr Frost's otherwise indecisive score), and some superb work on the theme of contorted mutation with the dancers' heads tucked forward, somehow completely out of sight between their shoulders; as their bodies morph, entwine and pulsate across almost every inch of the stage. The artistry and execution is exceptional: and it is a scintillating promise of what is to come.

Sadly, it is a promise that is soon broken.

Almost immediately, and with then only rare respite, Black Marrow collapses and falls apart under the weight of its clichés (think carnivalesque, ringleader, circus, toy dinosaurs, Mythology for Preschoolers) and is reduced to a twee playground aesthetic: even though it is entirely lacking in a child's unquestionable and fearless curiousity about how the end of our world will look, feel and sound. For the rest of its 60 minutes running time, it becomes increasingly stage-bound – resulting in a strangely one dimensional landscape.

The exceptions are the brilliance of the thrilling 'last gasp' full body extensions from the floor against the repetitious beeps of a heart-monitoring machine, and the fights against flat-lining that accentuate the dancers' ultimate physical prowess and powerful physical fluidity. Their floorwork is exceptional ... which only highlights the fact that there is little further exploration of full extension: especially at the end, when covered in black oil (yes, an environmental message delivered with the subtly of a fire-hydrant), they only stand to collapse again, even if it is into magnificent Pompeii-inspired frozen corpses, recoiling in horror from the pain of their demise. Minutes from the end, it is a frustratingly fleeting, powerful whiff of all that might have been.

The Spoken Word in the context of Dance in performance has always been a complicated affair, and in this case, it results in a kind of ill-considered, pseudo homoerotic, egocentric and indulgent monologue that only serves to fail the physical vocabulary that wants to fuel the work: and the less said about the grotesquely misogynist birthing sequence … and a silly machine sequence (that immediately reminded me of my own Contemporary Dance classes at Rusden Drama College in 1980-something), the better.

Ultimately tentative, earnest and essentially unfulfilling, Black Marrow delivers little of the thought-provoking, edge-of-the-seat, incisive choreographic adventure we expect from Melbourne's premiere dance company. The dancers are faultless and meet the precise physical demands of the work's rare and momentary highpoints to absolute perfection. This only makes the extent to which they are starved of the raw, truthful creative exhaustion and repetition (to which the work makes what turns out to be spurious claims in the program) even more obvious. And bitterly disappointing.

Photo: Black Marrow, photographed by Alexandra Mein.

This review was commissioned and published by Stage Whispers @
www.stagewhispers.com.au