Home Alone
Company Upstairs
Rechabites Hall
William Street, Perth
Part of the Artrage Festival 2008
This was another in a number of works I have seen this year that deal with Australian suburbia and especially in the celebration of it as a burgeoning part of our cultural landscape. We have sprawling flat suburbs that go on forever in our biggest cities (Perth being no exception), and the Australian dream of owning your own home there is part of our ethos. And up until a few months ago this was fine, but now the home has become a chain around our neck and the suburban sprawl has only heartbreak in it.
The focus of Home Alone was not so much about the Home itself (although the set was quite an achievement) but about the people within it. Set in three main rooms (two downstairs and one large one above) and a little bit outside the house we are let into (due to a cross section cut away) the lives of three individuals. It took me a while to understand what these people were to each other – flatmates, siblings, family? I think in the end that they were supposed to be mother, father and child, but due to the fairly even age of the dancers I am not sure if this worked.
I was drawn to this work by the poster, an evocative shot of a dancer (Keira Mason-Hill) jammed in a corner with her leg in contact with the roof looking down at a drummer with full drum kit. I am not sure what I expected from the show but the poster was intriguing enough that I thought it might be something that pushed the boundaries of dance by using live instrumentation on stage in an interesting way. The drummer was onstage the whole time, but didn’t seem to be a part of the show, which made me wonder why he as needed. I enjoyed his presence, but if you can’t interact with him then why was he there?
The three dancers (Mason-Hill, Kathryn Puie and Joe Jurd) were very skilled and this was apparent all the way through and they worked hard to make the piece work in what was a demanding non-stop physical show dealing with each other, objects and the set. I feel they were let down by the material and possibly the direction (although this is hard to tell as I am not sure how this work was devised). At times the narrative in the work created quite simplistic scenes that didn’t engender any extra feeling in the characters. The ‘I am drinking’ dance and the ‘domestic violence’ dance had no mystery about them and therefore fell down. This is a difficult thing to do and much like Falling for Frank at Next Wave earlier this year (which I thought was much more successful) trying to find a way that physicality can tell the story without mime is the challenge. I like the territory that this work was trying to get to and I feel like Bianca Martin has all the right elements, but maybe needs more time to put it together.
