Obstructed sightlines and dissolved edges
Three performances, two days
Innocence
Atlanta Eke
Friday 15th March, 2024
Great Hall, NGV
(1pm–2pm)
Alter Edith
Holly Durant
Friday 15th March, 2024
Sylvia Staehli Theatre, Dancehouse
(Durational performance from 7pm–9pm)
Liable
Amrita Hepi
Sunday 16th March, 2024
Great Hall, NGV
(3pm–4pm)
Precarious Movements, my response to three independent performances in two days, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
If you believe, you can make yourself into Cerberus, the three-headed dog-like monster, who guards the third circle of Hell, the circle of the gluttons, by buttoning together a couple of oversized shirts, and sitting together with two other people, in a huddle on the floor. With three heads close together, you’ll never miss a trick. There is no-one in the assembled audience in the gallery that misses your detection. Or so it feels momentarily in Atlanta Eke’s Innocence.
If you can make the audience believe you can split yourself into three variations of one person, this time a person named Cass about to embark on an audition, you can pull the audience into a state of “playful polyphony, exploring how [the audience] might listen with [their] bodies” when faced with the “unreliable narrator”[i] in triplicate. Or so it feels candidly, momentarily in the impossible spaces Amrita Hepi’s Liable reveals.
If you believe an alien from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere should wish to return to Earth to pour a cocktail and, in turn, pour themselves into a cycle of constricting chartreuse costuming to states of undress and back again, anything is possible. Or so it vibrates, at excruciating volume, in Holly Durant’s “fling the pickle away”[ii] ongoing investigation in Alter Edith.
Innocence, by Atlanta Eke, photographed by Michael Pham
Three independent works that traverse the space where dance rubs shoulders with performance, and invite you, albeit not always warmly, to experience the revelation of a new space; to shake off your need to place dance in a neatly defined box; to unlatch from your mind the parameters that get in the way of feeling what is before you when you are, by turns, confronted and caressed by the left foot advancing beasts of William Blake, a body that speaks, and an alien that squeaks.
Unfolding in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Eke’s Innocence and Hepi’s Liable performances were commissioned by NGV as part of Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, “a research project that aims to bring artists, researchers and institutions into dialogue about best practice to support the choreographer and the museum, and to sustain momentum in theory and practice around dance and the visual arts”[iii]. With two viewings possible of each free performance, to coincide with the book launch of Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, “a publication that surveys the choreographic turn within the visual arts”[iv], edited by Erin Brannigan, Pip Wallis, Hannah Mathews and Louise Lawson with Amita Kirpalani, beneath the ‘prismatised’ splendour of the stained-glass ceiling by Leonard French proves an ideal location to address Eke’s questioning of “how museums might protect and tend to an artwork”[v]. Like the pen and ink and watercolour over pencil and black chalk of the original works on paper by Blake, Eke sponged and scratched out the space with the central suspension of a semi-transparent divide onto which the artworks scrolled, and the performers, Eke, and paint-daubed Angela Goh, Ivey Wawn, and later Hana Miller, became a part of, in the redefining of a stage. Meanwhile, in the Sylvia Staehli Theatre of Dancehouse, Durant, as her alien alter ego, together with said alien’s director, Maude Davey, returned to their research last dissected at fortyfivedownstairs in 2021, in the durational remount of Alter Edith, and turned a stage into a gallery replete with domed sculptural forms by Danielle Brustman.
Liable, by Amrita Hepi, photographed by Michael Pham
Obstructed sightlines, whether by the suspension of large sculptural forms or due to the size of the assembled crowd folded on the floor and upon small, collapsible stools in the Great Hall on a Sunday afternoon for Liable’s debut, and dissolved edges, whether due to the softness of a Blake watercolour on a semi-transparent screen in a bright hall or musician singer-songwriter Jonnine Standish, held in a spotlight as she later sang from the balcony, and was visible to me only through the illuminated screen of a person adjacent to me, as they recorded Standish’s performance, wove a link between the three works stronger than location and a weekend. In the gallery, you can record everything, in the role of a Be Your Own Curator on a Choose Your Own Adventure. And so, like proud parents at a school performance, the view before me is one of multiple images of the scene ahead as people raise their phones, record.
In continuation of the cyclic theme, the three heads of Cerberus, animated so as to sing Pattie Page’s (How Much Is) That Doggy in the Window, have near morphed into Hepi, Sarah Akin, and Standish, each in the role of Cas Perhaps, in a pre-audition confessional meets slippery half-truth. Cas, having been asked to dance, sing, and act, repeated the steps, but altered them ever so slightly, by tempo, phrasing, and emphasis, in the spinning of a dream, in and out of time. “A lie should be as close to the truth as possible,” explains a version of the Cas loop. “Change small details. Change the times things happened. Change the order of events. I got that off Reddit.”
Upon one of several large screens, Aiken looks at the appearance of a murmuration (in a moving image collage of layers slowly altering by Rel Pham). Atop the screen the words read: “The aim is to produce an affect in the audience.” Dante’s hill on which the sun is shining! Out the corner of my eye, Blake’s leopard of worldly pleasure still spins. A diversion in an umwelt bubble, an environment of my own comprising, until the next time.
Alter Edith, by Holly Durant, photographed by Cat Black
[i] Amrita Hepi, Liable project notes, Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/triennial/artists-designers/amrita-hepi/, accessed 16th March, 2024
[ii] Holly Durant, Alter Edith programme notes, Season One, Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Alter-Edith-by-Holly-Durant-Program-Notes.pdf, accessed 15th March, 2024.
[iii] Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, The University of New South Wales (UNSW, Sydney), https://www.unsw.edu.au/arts-design-architecture/our-schools/arts-media/our-research/our-projects/precarious-movements-choreography-museum, accessed 15th March, 2024.
[iv] Book Launch; Choreography and the Museum, with keynote by Jimmy Robert, NGV, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/choreography-and-the-museum/, accessed 15th March, 2024.
[v] Atlanta Eke, Innocence project notes, Triennial, NGV, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/performance-innocence-by-atlanta-eke/, accessed 15th March, 2024.
Innocence
Choreographer and dancer: Atlanta Eke
Executive producer: Hana Miller
Sound composition and performance: Daniel Jenatsch
Scenography: Tim Birnie/Dawn Architecture
Video and Projection Design: Hana Miller and Jacob Perkins / RDYSTDY
Dancer: Ivey Wawn
Dancer: Angela Goh
Scenography and 3D Digital Architectural Design: Tim Birnie / Dawn Architecture
Alter Edith
Creator & Performer: Holly Durant
Director: Maude Davey
Stage Manager & Performer: Ayesha Harris-Westman
Lighting Technician & Performer: Jaala Jensen
Choreographic Assistant: Gabi Barton
Sound Artist: Quell (Bensen Thomas)
Spatial & Set Design: Danielle Brustman
Costume Design & Stylist: James Andrews
Accessories Designer: Grae Burnished
Light Artist: Gina Gascoigne
Liable
Project Credits Choreographer/Performer: Amrita Hepi
Creative Producer: Zoe Theodore
Music Composition: Daniel Jenatsch
Rehearsal Director/Performer: Sarah Aiken
Moving image: Rel Pham
Performer: Jonnine Standish
Dramaturg: Mish Grigor
Wardrobe, costume and dressing: D&K — Ricarda Bigolin & Chantal Kirby
Image credit: Holly Durant in Alter Edith at Dancehouse, by Cat Black
