Something In The Way She Moves

Something In The Way She Moves: everyday dances for an invisible woman is part of the Performance Space ‘SEXES’ season, currently running at Carriageworks until 1 December. Something is a three-night affair, and collects together a number of smaller works from creator Julie-Anne Long’s The Invisibility Project.

And what, you might ask, is The Invisibility Project? In an interview for the MCA website earlier this year, Long explained that it is ‘concerned with the invisibility of middle-aged women. Not only thinking about my everyday experiences as a middle aged woman, but also what this means for me as a dancer/performer.’

Or alternatively, from the evening’s program: ‘Tonight I present for you a mere figment of my findings, a glimpse into the rich pickings of my undercover research which falls into the category of Ladies: The Inner Life Of. My territory is the Sensorium and in particular those urges that lurk at the edges of invisibility, that strange and distant land inhabited by women of a certain age, women who sometimes bellow and howl and dance wildly till they dampen their underwear and who, when their work is done, come together to plot the overthrow of the patriarchy, an end to conspicuous consumption, uninhibited growth, alienated labour and other misguided obsessions of western civilisation. There have been times in the course of my experiments when I thought that I might be on the verge of discovering either vestiges of the matriarchy or a hole in the roof where the rain gets in. See for yourself.’

In that ideal world, perhaps. As it is, you’re going to have to hear about it from me instead.

In Something In The Way She Moves, Long plays a homemaker whose days are spent dutifully wrapping sandwiches, washing the laundry and dishes, vacuuming the carpet and, on the side, providing what could be described as ‘motherly’ encouragement for a phone sex line. Her own sexuality is expressed through (presumably) imagined dance routines and re-imagined scenes from The Graduate [1967]. To the soundtrack of Whitney Houston’s ‘I’m Every Woman’, for example, sandwich-making becomes a routine featuring the rhythmic spreading of margarine, the twirled sealing of brown paper bags, etc. This surely has its charms, but the sad truth for those of us approaching middle age is that charms do tend to fade; after the first couple of minutes, such routines, drawn out far too long, themselves become a bit of a chore. Like a bored spouse, I found my attention wandering.

Maybe that’s the point. Certainly, the final part of the performance, which features Long, her ‘sidekick mini-mum’ Narelle Benjamin and others tidying up the stage, suggests a degree of indifference to the audience, who, perhaps, are meant to get a sense from this of what it is to be invisible.

On the positive side, Long is a graceful, charismatic performer and the power dynamic of her relationship with Benjamin, who portrays a kind of domestic ‘gimp’ wrapped in crochet rather than leather, is intriguing. More could be made of it, and of Benjamin’s role generally. The lighting, too, was effective, and the performance space used imaginatively throughout.

Rating: 1 ½ stars out of 5