martyn coutts

In the Perfect Present with Jo Lloyd

September 18, 2011

Within a minute of Future Perfect I found myself again in a mesmeric trance of Jo lloyd’s making.
From here, with only a slight reprieve to take in a video piece, we are held by bouncing hypnotic states that all five performers would work out of. Slightly altering, fracturing and shifting order,
A rippling evolutionary mass of shattering and ever reforming fractals.
At the end of it I realised I was still in the state that it left me in – I was worked into this vibration that changed me and I felt fundamentally altered.

The sound in this work was so sublime, Duane Morrison pushed the intensity through waves of synth and driving electro. There were times I felt like I was in the movie Dune or some other classic sci-fi film, at another point he delivered one of the best rave like peaks to a track that was so exciting that someone behind me gasped and said ‘fuck’. If Duane doesn’t win an award for his sound in this there is something wrong with the world.

There were a couple of moments for me that let down what was an otherwise incredibly moving experience, I felt like the ordering of material created a couple of situations that felt out of place – the final piece ended so abruptly that I was thinking ‘no, no, no! give me some time to come out of this gently…’. And where to place the video piece without disturbing the flow and momentum of the show was always going to be tricky.

But these were minor quibbles…

It is interesting I had been having a conversation about Dance Theatre or Physical Theatre in relation to Look Right Through Me which I saw the previous night at the Malthouse. I was positing that dance is not literal, it is abstract at its best.

Dance for me is more akin to music than theatre. When I think about the dance work that I love the best it is visceral, emotive and physical it is never gestural, character or narrative.

I don’t want a story, if I had wanted that I would have gone to the cinema or watched the DVD box set of the Wire.

I can’t tell you what Future Perfect is about because words are useless for something so experiential. And that is how it should be – great performance has to be experienced to be believed and if you weren’t there you didn’t get it.

I am one of the lucky ones, because I got to see the perfect future, and it was happening in the perfect present.