Situ-8: City

STRUT Dance and Tura New Music
The Liberty Theatre, Perth
Nov 1–11

 

Situ-8 is an annual program of site-specific short dance works co-produced by two of Perth’s most vital arts organisations, STRUT Dance and Tura New Music. Featuring a suite of collaborations by local and interstate choreographers, composers, dancers, musicians and other creatives made for a different non-theatre venue each year, it’s a fantastic opportunity for artists and audiences to access new spaces and make new connections, and to ‘re-situate’ contemporary dance and music in relation to the unique physical and cultural architecture of the city itself. It also gives artists, audiences, artworks and artforms that heightened sense of collective presence in time and space which is essential to all live performance and which site-specific work is especially conducive to.

 

Previous Situ-8 sites have included the Old Perth Girls School, Cyril Jackson Senior College, the entire WA State Theatre Centre (including the courtyard, foyers and staircases) and the foyer, bar, rooms and rooftop of the boutique inner-city Alex Hotel. This year’s Situ-8: City is STRUT’s first production under the new leadership team of James O’Hara and Sofie Burgoyne and is co-curated by Burgoyne and local contemporary performance maker Timothy Green with curatorial assistant Ashleigh White. It takes place in The Liberty Cinema, a long-disused and abandoned cinema on Barrack Street Mall in the Perth CBD. The building hails from the Goldrush era and from the 1950s through to the 90s hosted foreign-language and arthouse films but has been empty over the past 25 years and fallen into a state of spectacular disrepair that heightens its ambience of history and transience. 

 

The curators of Situ–8: City have wisely chosen to keep additional design elements to a minimum and focus on the building itself as a character and ‘work’ in its own right alongside the work of the choreographers, composers and performers. A crucial exception to this austerity is Lucy Birkenshaw’s sensitive and evocative lighting, which deploys carefully chosen, framed and positioned digital lamps and LED strips, overlaid by her characteristically rich use of colours. This (along with consistently well-judged and artful use of music by all the composers ranging from vaporwave or dance beats to ambient and electronic soundscapes) provides a kind of visual-spatial (and musical) dramaturgy which effectively frames and unifies what might otherwise be a somewhat disparate experience in terms of the works themselves, the various parts of the building in which they take place, and the brain-teasing structure of the evening.

 

This structure consists of two overlapping performances for two different audiences, with each performance beginning at a different starting time. Both performances are in two parts separated by an interval, but each performance consists of the same two parts in the opposite order. This means that the first audience experiences the first part of the first performance and then mingles with the second audience (of which I was a member) during the first interval as well as sharing the first part of the second performance (which is also the second part of the first performance). The first audience then leaves during the second interval, and the second audience is left to experience the final part of the second performance (which repeats the initial part of the first performance). For the performers, this means that the entire evening has the form of a triptych, with the first part repeated as the final part (but for a different audience).

 

To make things even more complex, one of the two parts consists of five works which are performed in sequence in five different spaces on two different floors inside the building, concluding in the vast ruined space of the ground floor cinema. The other part features three works performed in sequence in the cinema space, including the raised stage at one end and the upstairs ‘VIP room’ at the other end, the interior of which is visible from the floor of the cinema. (This is the order in which I saw the two parts.) I found the latter part more absorbing and transformative in terms of my relationship with the performers and the space; whereas in the former part I felt somewhat alienated from the works and uncertain about where to be in the building or the room at any given time, whether the overall experience was meant to be self-navigating/immersive or scheduled/promenade, and more generally about my role as a witness or participant. To be fair, this element of uncertainty is a feature of all immersive performance, but in this case it was heightened by my sense of uncertainty about the form itself.

 

As for the individual works: the curatorial brief invited the artists to respond to ‘a key element from a film, reimagining it to speak to the artists’ identities’ in order to examine ‘how stories, bodies, voices and characters have been included and excluded from The Liberty Theatre and the history of cinema’ (I’m quoting from the program). For me the most interesting works were those that interrogated the relationship between live performance and cinema (considered both as a medium and a venue) as well as specifically between film, identity and embodiment; perhaps unsurprisingly all these works were staged in the cinema space. 

 

‘Mercury Bones’ by Olivia Hendry and Kimberley Parkin, which closed the first part of the performance I saw, featured a hauntingly sparse live and pre-recorded score by David Stewart and Nonie Trainor, culminating in thrilling live voice loops generated by Trainor and mixed by Stewart; an energetic and enigmatic solo dance performance by Parkin in a blue veil and body stocking; and a huge video projection by Edwin Sitt across the entire length of one wall. This showed gritty low-fi home-movie-style footage (made even grittier by the delapidated state of the wall) reminiscent of early Warhol/Paul Morrissey films and featuring people from various minority communities (queer, disabled, culturally diverse) disporting themselves in various domestic or outdoor settings and states of dress-up or undress. 

 

At the start of the ‘second’ part, Sarah Aitken’s ‘Demake/Demaster’ had a minimal electronic score by Alice Humphries, while on the stage at one end of the cinema two medium-sized video screens showed found and constructed footage featuring hands, arms, legs and other body segments, while Aitken coolly and deftly inserted herself behind and ‘into’ the footage. Finally, this part of the performance ended with ‘The Melody Haunts My Reverie’, a hilarious and macabre interactive tour de force by Antonio Rinaldi and Celina Hage, in which Hage progressively removed items of clothing while dancing with selected audience members (and finally a white mask and pair of dismembered mannequin arms) across the ground floor of the cinema, while upstairs in the ‘VIP room’ Rinaldi in lipstick, pushed-back hair and a trench-coat interacted with a hapless audience member (delivered to him by Hage) while answering phones and lip-synching snatches of dialogue from classic Hollywood melodramas (including a fabulous sample from Rebecca); this soundscape was stitched together in a heavily processed montage by Eduardo Cossio. Birkenshaw’s saturated monochromatic lighting came into its own during this work, especially as it honed in on the closing image of a reverse-masked Hage dancing topless with the mannequin arms beneath Rinaldi in a bowler hat with a stocking pulled over his face cavorting on the balcony with the audience member frozen in terror beside him.

 

In sum, Situ-8: City is unquestionably the most complex and ambitious iteration I’ve seen in this remarkable series, and a triumph of programming and curatorial vision by Green, Burgoyne and the producing team at STRUT Dance and Tura New Music. Its prevailing sense of liberty is as appropriate to the venue as it is inspirational. As Mrs Danvers whispers to Rebecca: ‘Why don’t you jump? Go on! You know you want to.’