To be left with something for long enough that it draws me to write about it. Is this not the mark, the reason for great art.
The thumping bassline, thundering through the open wharf warehouse shed on Hobart’s waterfront bringing my chest to terms with my emotions, tears coming to my eyes, unsure why. This, this, this moment…
And why should i feel anything? Balletlab’s ludicrous program of works here at MONA FOMA is too much; too much to dance in, too much to direct and possibly too much to receive by any audience. But here they are doing what they do best, pushing the boundary of their own beings to see what happens.
And they began with the beginning, the startpoint, the launchpad for all the other works – Amplification and as I sat and soaked it up i could see the preoccupations and the fixations – death, sexuality, fear/wonder at what lies beyond and the vehicle for everything – the body in motion.
MONA FOMA this year was a heaving mess of bands, artworks, stories and percussion seemingly jammed together in an unorderly program. On the friday night of the opening Speak Percussion were programmed at the same time as the Scientists of Modern Music – a more cataclysmic mix you could not find. And yet somehow it all managed to work – even novellist Neil Gaiman’s collaboration with Fourplay at 9pm on a Saturday night managed to capture the audiences imagination, as a couple of thousand people sat down on the ground in Princes Wharf and were read a story.
So into this tumult was thrown the only performance company at MONA FOMA – Balletlab. When the lights went down on the ‘Balletlab stage’ I started to think that this was a mistake, the programming, the set up of the stage, the time of day that leaked light into the space. Surely this was a company that needed to be seen in a pure light – with quiet and darkness…
But after Lynton Carr’s began to spin the wheels of steel I let it all go – this company has all the rock and roll swagger that is necessary at a time like this, they fitted right in.
Amplification is 12 years old (1999) and in some parts it showed – slow walking sequences and angular jerky group choreography reminiscent of a Melbourne dance scene from the late 90′s gave the work a nostalgic feel. Even the fluoro lighting and sound from turntables added to this.
As I discussed whilst watching the Pacitti Company’s work Civil a year or two back, pieces like this need to reach beyond the timeframe in which they were made and become universal or utilise the material in a new way, by incidental reference to the new time it is being shown in.
I felt like Amplification succeeded in remaining fresh and relevant in parts and the sections that felt dated acted as a form of time travel for me as I moved back and forward.
The imagery in the work remains potent, bodies manipulated inside scenes of eroticism or existentialist horror, sometimes both at the same time, is the enduring memory of Amplification. The final image of all the dancers lying in discarded positions, summons the best of the horrors of war and holocaust. Guernica springs to mind as does My Lai, and in an uncanny co-incidence the Queensland floods emergency which had unfolded over the previous three weeks also was triggered.
The potency of the body that is so tightly and expertly woven around the space int he early parts of the work is then put at the mercy of a force greater than its own. Amplification is about the way the body interacts with a vehicle in a crash situation but it could as easily be seen as a metaphor for the uncontrollability of our environment and the vulnerability of our physical shell.
The use of manipulation by other dancers feet and hands cements this idea, as bodies are flung about like test-dummies inside created cars.
The body is so at the centre of this work that when the dancers begin to appear in less and less clothing, I am initially titillated and shocked (especially because this is no theatre, this is a shed with wooden seating banks and pink beanbags for punters), but then was completely sold on the fact that in order for us to truly understand the process of impact, death, burial and beyond that we need to see the body in its pure form.
The power play between those clothed and those disrobed (dis-tracksuited), becames important for a time especially a naked Tim Harvey being shifted by three clothed women.
In the final moments we are left with Brooke Stamp who makes a decision to join those on the ground, taking her own clothes off and moving aside other bodies to create a picture which she is happy with. Is she happy to join them in death, does she see it as preferable?
This final image is one of both high eroticism and clawing despair, the sexualisation of death being brought to its zenith. Lynton Carr’s thumping heartbeat-esque soundscape brutal in its unforgiving relentlessness and bringing an emotive and dark endpoint to the work.
I was thankful to see this one off performance in this very special context and feel extremely privileged to have seen Brooke Stamp, Tim Harvey, Carlee Mellow, Jo White and Rennie McDougall perform Amplification.
I would have loved to be there for the two other works of the trilogy Miracle (which i have seen and love) and a new work Above which features a film created during 24 Hours at Dancehouse last year by Matthew Gingold, but alas I had to return to Melbourne.
Amplification plays again at Dance massive in March.
