martyn coutts

miracle
balletlab
16th july 2009, 8pm
meat market, melbourne
i wrote this straight away after the show, it has no real form to it, but i am loathe to edit it as it is the way that i have experienced it. i guess it is my own form of speaking in tongues.

a miracle, after seeing the show i can’t speak or think straight, i am unusually jumpy and anxious, quick to anger. but also emotional. not all of it worked, some of it screamed at you, not just through the speakers but also in what it was saying, thinly veiled ritualistic movement pulled from sufism, muslim prayer, pagan ritual, catholic rites and jedi knights. but we are slammed with it everyday, it is part of our lives, has been, will always be – what then, what then is the point of all this? as the four performers stumbled along a floor filled with harmonicas, trying to play them i realised it didn’t matter what was being said, because in the end it never does matter, it has been mediated by us, the actual word of god is filtered though a megaphone, a microphone, through ritualised prayers, we can’t hear the words, they are mumbled, shouted, screamed in incoherencies. in the end we are watching not the message but the medium; a whole hour of non-miracle, of the people who create the miracle but never actually feel it. the whole piece opened with an extended moment – the kind of moment that you can only have in a place of worship – that peace, the quiet and contemplative space. as i watched the smoke wisp around the lights and illuminate the lighting rig, my breath began to slow and i experienced the wonder of sitting and stopping. my jaw full of gum stopped and my heart rate dropped. the miracle of nothingness. and here was our church, somehow magestic and also somehow so very hollow. as if the lights were illuminating the function and not actually the content of the word. again and again this became clear throughout the work, that the stuff that was foregrounded was the mechanics of the action, microphones dropped in and out of the space, power cable used as swinging instrument, megaphones…in watching some of the looping motifs I was reminded of the square patterning work in brindabella and also of the use of four (performers) – which somehow seemed complete in miracle – that the symmetry of four somehow encompassed and embraced a church, a square, a house – two women and two men, somehow not sexualised or ever really paired off but automatically creating a righteous balance. these men and women that people these strange worlds seem humans in rapture, lost angels and also possessed souls all at once, screaming, smashing, raping, casting down, reaching out for salvation and yet we are still watching real, live, fleshy bodies being thrashed live in front of us, women with breasts bared, men stripped to underwear, beautiful, but not sexual. the clothing seeming to hark back to the late 60′s and early 70′s, i was reminded of age of aquarius, and protest marches, it somehow felt european, of a time past, and the middle piece/movement with clogs, made me think of a more secular religious experience – something of the dutch prodestantism, of the more perfunctory nature of delivering the message to their flock in a lutheran world as opposed to the wailing and hollering and speaking in tongues of the first piece. indeed the word and language was incredibly placed in miracle, i felt it was given more power and weight than in brindabella. and i think the reason for this was that we couldn’t understand any of it, no matter how clear the message. and here is the disjunct between what is being said and what is heard by the audience replicating the mediation that occurs between god and his/her subjects as it is funneled through the mouthpieces of the different religions. i was reminded of the story of the tower of babel where god created thousands of different languages as punishment for man, there is so much noise but i cant understand what it being said i wrote on my hand in the middle of the performance. again i was impressed by the sheer heart and emotion taken on by the balletlab performers in what must be a harrowing experience every night, nowhere have i seen such commitment and heart in melbourne dance and i am glad of it. luke george in particular is a commitment machine, throwing himself into the most difficult of places performatively and although not always bringing the audience with him on all occasions, he endangers all for the sake of the work and i love the journey of that risk and am willing to take it with him time and time again. in many ways it is easy to be funny and easy to be cool in contemporary dance, but it is hard to be truthful and serious. we were offered earplugs at the start of the night and there certainly was an experience of being bombarded with sound, but it altogether fitted with the piece, somehow as the sound roared through your body, you either became aware of the physical nature of sound vibrations – that they are an actual thing that hits you that (as someone mentioned at a conference i went to in nz last month said) sound is actual physical. but also of spirits racing through you. the mix between live sound from voice off the performers mixed with david chisholms classical tinged compositions sometimes created a cacophony in which you had to literally pick you way through mentally to be able to stay in the room and not put your hands over your ears. other times it was wound back and soundtracking to the piece. i have noticed i have not talked about dance once yet. they are all great, what more can i say? beautiful bodies, mature performance, great group work, but in the end this work and balletlabs in the recent era is much more than dance, so much more. i have run out of energy, this has felt like some sort of exorcism, i couldn’t stay after the show to see my good friends who performed, i am very bad after shows needing to run away to take in what has been given to me, i guess this is almost a ritualistic act that i need time to contemplate, in some ways my own personal miracle is in seeing work like this, and although at times flawed it has moved me, and is that not why we are all here in the end?