Footnote gives an evocative performance of The Clearing
The Clearing, by Ross McCormack for Footnote New Zealand Dance’s national tour
Wellington Opera House, October 24 Reviewed by Lyne Pringle
Footnote New Zealand Dance continues to present robust cutting edge contemporary dance theatre with The Clearing.
Choreographer Ross McCormack, like a toothy medieval alchemist, gnashes at the form with unrelenting and uncompromising ingenuity.
The dancers in the company bring sophisticated creative power to the work. In the seasoned ensemble are Georgia BeecheyGradwell, Tyler Carney, Joshua Faleatua, Adam Naughton and Anu Khapung.
Each brings a unique quality as they gather in a forest clearing.
They emerge slowly, bewildered, displaced, furtive, birthed, combative. The performance intensity they conjure is assured and compelling: Naughton’s ferret-like spatial whir; to Faleatua’s statuesque cyclopic presence; Beechey-Gradwell’s liquid serenity; Carney’s fierce snarling animalistic rant; Khapung’s quiet earthy power.
Rough-hewn movement is crafted superbly. One scene is a breathtaking culmination of repetition, retrograde and accumulation; it climaxes in a tumbling mass of rolling bodies – technology and human foibles battling with the natural corporeal world.
Everything onstage and in our ears is in a constant state of flux, there are multiple viewpoints as figures and objects shapeshift, metamorphise and transform.
At the heart of McCormack’s vision is collaborator Jason Wright – sound becomes movement, movement becomes sound they are totally interspersed.
One of the great successes of the work is the strangeness that results from disrupted perception of where sound originates – the dancers ‘‘caught between frequencies’’, as McCormack describes it.
Lighting by Lisa Maul adds texture and mystery. The eerie strangeness of Serapine Pick’s forest paintings and Martin Basher’s dance floor in the middle of a pine forest are evoked.
The Clearing is utterly virtuosic in terms of performance, choreography and production elements. The integration of all of these elements creates a kinetic work of art that is equal parts choreography, visual and audio.
It is laced with a wry sense of humour and many moments that evoke curiosity, then stun and surprise as we are coxed into a new way of seeing.
Nothing is as it seems and the world is made strange. Familiar yet oddly unknowable; a ritualistic, totemic, chthonic tone poem – but does it let the viewer in?
The images are epic and powerful but somehow they fail to ignite an emotional response. Where are we taken beyond the manipulation of objects, albeit brilliantly, and innovative choreography tasked around certain themes?
A more intimate setting with improved sight lines could yield a different experience.
demands a lot from the viewer, which is exactly where this choreographer and this company should continue to position themselves.