Fab four on the floor
Dancenorth set piece showcase
GIVING Dancenorth’s dancers the annual opportunity to devise and choreograph an annual program of short pieces has become something of a tradition over the past five years, and this year’s sampling of four works is the company’s best yet.
Dancenorth’s Associate Artistic Director, Amber Haines, has again curated the four pieces which features the work of six dancers – Damian Meredith, Tiana Lung, Issy Estrella, Felix Sampson, Nelson Earl and Michael Smith.
As in past years the offering is given the full production values by the Dancenorth creative team with particularly impressive lighting design by Yoshi Kenny.
The four works contrasted significantly in style, content and delivery, and managed to carry the audience into realms of fantasy and imagination, while at the same time throwing liberal amounts of humour, a failsafe guarantee to engage the audience.
While there was no overarching theme to the content of four pieces, what was evident were the improvisational techniques used not only in the creative process but also in performance.
Set to a weird techno music score totally in keeping with the subject matter, Damian Meredith’s “Polymorphic Utopia” was an amusing, offbeat piece which attempted to make sense of the upside down world we live in at the moment.
He used repetitive movement and varied delivery of single fatuous conversational words to highlight the absurdity of it all.
Dancenorth’s Tiana Lung was joined by Sydney guest collaborator, Issy Estrella for “roach.”, a duet which featured both dancers.
Moving in perfect harmony with each other, the piece clearly demonstrated that the dancers had worked together for a long time.
Beginning with powerful cinematic imagery delivered through lighting, it was accompanied by a score which could quite easily have been heard in a video game arcade.
Felix Sampson piece “Life Gets in the Way” poked some fun at contemporary society’s habit of being available (and interrupted) all the time on the phone.
The final piece was a powerful and interesting collaboration between Nelson Earl and
Michael Smith, “Same Story: Dead”, which looked at how mythology is entwined in the connections between human and god.
A bizarre and effective combination of contemporary latex masks, grotesque Ancient Greek masks, machinery and nudity, the two dancers excelled in movement which made it at times difficult to separate the two bodies.
A successful and diverse season which clearly demonstrated the creative choreographic potential in the Dancenorth dancers.
Tomorrow Makers 5 (pictured above) plays for one more performance tonight at 7pm.