The eagerly anticipated new work by Chunky Move’s Artistic Director, choreographer Anouk van Dijk, has finally arrived at the Malthouse for Dance Massive. A bold and eclectic piece featuring the occasional use of spoken word as well as a strikingly beautiful physicality, the production ranges dramatically across the cavernous Merlyn Theatre stage, which is bare save for a towering wall of mirrors which the dancers move amidst and among, and later move around.
Whereas van Dijk’s debut work with Chunky Move was an exploration of group dynamics, 247 Days is a more introspective piece, an exploration of self-awareness and self-reflection. ‘You always focus on your worst fears,’ one of the dancers announces late in the show, and indeed, it seems van Dijk has transformed the stage into an echo chamber for her performers’ self-doubts and uncertainties.
Dancer Lauren Langlois begins the piece performing closely before one of the mirrors, which of course reflects a fuzzy image of her and of the audience watching her. Pressed up close against the reflective surface, the slight blur of her reflection surrounds Langlois like a halo, adding an extra inch of length to each movement she makes.
Dressed in a simple white shift, she flings her arms out suddenly, turns about abruptly as if trying to catch her reflection out, paces, spins again, faster, and faster still. A body mike captures the sound of her breath and makes it part of the sound design; coupled with her panting, the multiple reflections of her body seem to indicate her uncertain mental state, recalling the fractured lives of films noir’s femme fatales as reflected in broken mirrors, in particular the climactic funhouse ending of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai.
As the rest of the company take to the stage, they move almost intuitively, like a flock of birds, changing speed, directions and steps as one. The power, focus and skill of each dancer is mirrored by the set behind them, but also in their fellow performers. At one point in the dance, as they stop in place, rising on to the balls of their feet, it almost seems as if they will take flight en masse.
The piece moves through different scenes with varying success. A silent scream at a switched off microphone jars, and pulls focus from James Pham’s solo. A powerful sequence which deftly evokes the ache and pull of a love triangle, danced by the three men in the cast, Pham, Alya Manzart and Leif Helland, redeems that silent stumble, and is the stand-out moment of the show.
247 Days seems to turn in a new direction when a secret door is opened in the wall of mirrors. Watching the set be broken down, seeing the dancers fold the mirrors around one another and in on themselves, creates a new spectrum of illusion. Van Dijk seems to be asking us to consider how we look at ourselves when no one is watching, and to remember what it feels to observe, to watch someone who cannot see you. As if to reflect the work’s growing self-awareness, colour begins to seep into the costume design, giving the dancers’ individuality or emphasizing a specific pairing between two of them, in contrast to the monochromatic costumes worn in the opening sections.
Unfortunately this later section of the work starts to drag a little; it seems disconnected from the audience, nor do the dancers perform in such a way as to hold the viewer’s attention. By the end of the piece they are reduced to music-box-style figures standing passively on slowly spinning discs which have been pushed onto the stage.
Van Dijk has proven she has visionary ideas and is more than capable of pushing her dancers to meet them, though towards the end of this work it seems her ideas can’t quite stretch to fill the production’s 70 minute running time. It was always going to be difficult to follow up 2012’s award-winning An Act of Now; while bold, 247 Days doesn’t quite hit the mark of its predecessor. Even so, it will be exciting to see where van Dijk takes the company next.
Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5
247 Days
Presented by Malthouse Theatre and Chunky Move
Concept and Choreography: Anouk van Dijk
Composition/Sound Designer: Marcel Wierckx
Set Designer: Michael Hankin
Lighting Designer: Niklas Pajanti
Costume Designer: Shio Otani
Performers: Leif Helland, Lauren Langlois, Alya Manzart, James Pham, Niharika Senapati and Tara Soh
Merlyn Theatre, The Malthouse, Melbourne
15 – 23 March
Dance Massive 2013
www.dancemassive.com.au
15 – 23 March
