Image: Tanya Voltchanskaya & Matt Sav; Courtesy Next Wave Festival.
The program handed out as we enter Emma Fishwick’s microLandscapes is a sparse black and white booklet of scattered poetry. The poetry of the booklet speaks of bodies, senses, sensation, physical experience. So it is with this in my mind – and body – that I enter a piece of work described by the festival as an ‘immersive 360-degree’ experience.
The space is scattered with small, white structures, mostly made of paper, all resembling mountains and landscapes. A performer is lying in the entrance to the space. There are abstract projections and an ambient, electronic soundscape. The audience roam the space for a short while, taking in each zone of this curated white space in turn. But ultimately, we all settle – on stools or on the floor – and are treated to a beautiful dance piece.
There is plenty on offer here for the senses. The dance builds slowly and deliberately through repeated gestures and shapes shared by two bodies moving in unison. Those of us sitting right up against the edge of the dance space are immersed in the squeak of skin against the floor, the breath and sweat of the performers’ bodies, the rush of air currents as limbs fly close over our heads. The movement and tempo of the piece rise to a peak, fall away, rise once more, then taper back to stillness. The dancers are accomplished and transfixing, especially when they move in unison, carrying out the choreography with both precision and individual expression; or when the two dancers move in wide arcs around the space, following one another in elliptical patterns like starlings.
In spite of all this, I felt unable to fully engage with this piece. The ideas of landscape and of 360-degree immersion, which the piece purported to explore, were almost entirely absent. Whilst moments of stillness allowed us to read landscape in the performers’ bodies, their movements were too beautiful, too smooth, and all-together too human to continue this theme. And the ‘360-degree’ immersive experience was over before it began – audiences, given the chance, took up static positions in relationship to a very clearly demarcated stage, the borders of which were only rarely transgressed.
Perhaps there is a language this piece is speaking which I can’t understand. And certainly, lovers of dance will find two fine performers carrying out beautiful choreography. But I failed to experience this piece as anything other than an airy, beautiful display of the crafts of dance, projection, sound and design.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
microLandscapes
Creator and Choreographer: Emma Fishwick
Sound, Video and Technical Design: Kynan Tan
Dancers: Ella-Rose Trew, Niharika Senapati
Producer: Performing Lines WA
Next Wave Festival
Northcote Town Hall
4-8 May 2016
