Cast to the side of the Warehouse (Arts House) are two bodies crumpled around half-deflated stability balls. We can see the back of the head and the arms of one body, curled toward the haunches, sloping downstage, of the other, drawing our eyes to the flash of fluoro peach on the soles of two sneakers.
In front of them, a scrunched up sheet of clear plastic, its sharp creases and jagged angles mimicking their own. Upstage and far to the left, another sheet hangs flat from the ceiling, with a long tongue wrappered on the floor.
Choreographed by Chloe Chignell, Towards Transparency presents a corpuscular dissemblage of the human form, with the parts disconnected from the whole of these two bodies (Chignell with Leah Landau); their electrostatic jolt and skitter rupturing the natural rhythms of synaptic flow.
The head twitches; the toes curl and begin to drag: the bodies threaten to unfurl, and lie still again.
Through the speakers a chainsaw stutters into life, and with the deafening buzz the bodies convulse. The tops of their heads meet and they fumble into consciousness. Sliding horizontal across warped and rolling spheres, their legs kick, pushing their faces flat into the floor.
Tending toward inertia, the extension and elongation of the bodies is stymied, their movement compressed, afferent, characterised by collapse. The impression is of a fist clenched and adjusted, the audible stretch and rub of nylon balls against polished floorboards like the firm and uneasy pressure of fingertips into palm.
The bodies are led by elbows and knees, hips, wrists and ankles, and we take each component muscle into account. Alluding to athleticism, they transition from the swimmer’s kick to the runner’s starting block, snapping at the hip into sharp angles, heads buried in nylon, as into sand.
Composed live by Mitchell Mollison, the soundscape builds industrial noise and percussive rhythms into techno and acid trap, with the revving of engines underscoring qualities of strain, futility and fracture.
Producing an aesthetic more interested in the logistical than the ethereal, Towards Transparency resists completion, fluidity and definition in favour of limitation, fragmentation and slippage. Absorbed in the moment, we become attuned to the finer details of this bodily recalibration, and find it has passed us by all too quickly.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Towards Transparency
Choreographed by Chloe Chignell
Performed by Chloe Chignell and Leah Landau
Live sound by Mitchell Mollison
Melbourne Fringe Festival 2015
Arts House, North Melbourne
26 September – 03 October 2015 at 7.30pm
