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
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