Stephanie Lake Company: Manifesto

Perth Festival, Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA

STRUT Dance: Perth Moves/10 Duets on a Theme of Rescue

Perth Festival, State Theatre Centre of WA Courtyard

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Stephanie Lake’s Manifesto is the opening in-theatre show of Iain Grandage’s 2023 Perth Festival. It’s a big, bold, brash work; and a bold choice for a festival opener. 

 

Lake’s gutsy, accessible style of choreography and staging is a perfect match for Grandage’s own heart-on-his-sleeve, openly popularist aesthetic as a festival director, and the opening night audience seemed to eagerly devour it – spontaneously clapping and cheering during the show and giving it a standing ovation at the end.

 

Nine dancers – five women, four men – are initially revealed onstage lounging on chairs and wearing neat white pants and tops with black trimmings and bare feet. Above them nine drummers ­– with a similar gender-mix including at least one non-binary performer – sit dressed in black behind black rock’n’roll drum kits on a tiered platform with pink drapes descending to the floor. 

 

Charles Davis’s set, Paula Levis’s costumes and Bosco Shaw’s lighting all explicitly invoke the look and feel of a classic 1930s Depression-era Busby Berkley Hollywood musical. The prevailing mood of Lake’s choreography and Robin Fox’s score is for the most part similarly upbeat, upfront and shamelessly free of pretensions to deeper content or significance.

 

Manifesto was conceived by Lake and Fox over the past two years of the pandemic during the seemingly endless series of lockdowns in Melbourne, and the sense of relief, joy and (literally) tongue-poking defiance is palpable (and must have been even more so when it was first performed there in 2022 after debuting in Adelaide earlier that year). Lake describes the work as a ‘A Tattoo to Optimism’, and there’s a demonstrative and even regimented quality to the exuberance of the movement, music and staging that reminded me of cheerleading or ritualized military display. 

 

This sense of regimentation mercifully breaks down (and breaks out) into more freewheeling and individually expressive sequences, including trios, duets and solos by both the dancers and drummers (there are some explosive drum solos, call-and-response sections and chain-reactions). The dancers change costumes twice, their outfits becoming more dressed-down and then more personalised, leading to a final outburst of collective celebration, with hair loosened, items of clothing discarded, furniture attacked, and even the odd outbreak of that uniquely Australian (and much missed) form of protest, streaking (bring it back, I say). 

 

The technical virtuosity and evident sense of enjoyment shared by the dancers and drummers was palpable, and the audience duly responded in kind, but I felt more ambivalent.

 

Much of the choreography and music – most notably in the opening section – took the form of jarring, unpredictable stop-start freeze-frames and ‘samples’ of suddenly erupting and immediately arrested movement and sound (the two seemed to be so conjoined that it was impossible to say which was leading or following the other). This form of image and music-making reminded me of the jarring, unpredictable rhythm of the lockdowns themselves, especially in Melbourne, as well as the stop-start freeze-framing and sampling associated with video and hip hop, and the accelerated expansion of digital media into every aspect of our lives during the pandemic – including the increasing colonisation and even replacement of live performance by the internet and the small screen. 

At least it felt like an act of resistance to see this embodied onstage by the dancers and drummers, rather than invading the stage with cameras and screens or bombarding it with pre-recorded sound. In terms of movement, it's a contemporary-dance trope that’s almost become a cliché, but as a form of group spectacle I’ve never seen it taken to such extremes. 

 

In keeping with this sense of traumatised fragmentation I also felt there was a (possibly deliberate) absence of overall structure in the choreography and music, despite the impressive creation of stage pictures and the dazzling execution. In a way the whole show was more like a circus or cabaret consisting of a series of disjointed routines or ‘acts’ than a fully integrated work, which perhaps accounts for the strange sense of anticlimax I was left with at the end. 

 

Again, perhaps this lack of formal architecture was itself a refusal to abide by traditional forms of progression or integration, or a statement that such forms have been irrevocably shattered or are no longer relevant. As such, the work could be read as an aesthetic ‘manifesto’ as well as a physical and emotional one.

 

At times however I felt an urge to resist the insistent sense of mass appeal and the relentless if unspoken barrage of injunctions (‘Stop! Go! Enjoy!’). After all, the pandemic is not yet over; and the social, political and environmental problems that preceded it are still in train, perhaps more catastrophically than ever. 

 

That said, the show was at least a welcome distraction and invitation to put those problems out of mind for a while – much like the effect of watching a Busby Berkeley musical, in fact.

 

*

 

Outside in the State Theatre Centre Courtyard something more subtle and complex (and arguably more interesting) is afoot. 

 

STRUT Dance have programmed five days and nights of free activities and performances under the collective title: ‘Perth Moves’. The program includes meditation and yoga sessions, dance classes (Afro-Fusion, Hip Hop, Latin Social, House and contemporary dance are all covered, as well as classes for beginners and older or less experienced movers like yours truly), dance battles, late night DJ sets, open-access cast warmups, and free performances twice nightly of Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s 10 Duets on a Theme of Rescue. Appropriately for this year’s Festival theme of Djinda (stars), it all takes place under the night sky, and is a shining example of what a Festival can deliver to enliven a community.

 

STRUT has been running workshops with Pite’s company Kidd Pivot over the past five years, and now long-term Pite collaborator and Kidd Pivot member Cindy Welik-Salgado is restaging 10 Duets with a team of ten local, interstate and New Zealand dancers. The work was originally made for Cedar Lake in New York in 2008, and is performed by five dancers who take turns to inhabit the duets in a series of continuously and seamlessly shifting and changing partnerships (I’m assuming two groups of dancers alternate between the two performances each night). 

 

The energy and pace of the work also shifts and changes, but the mood is predominantly dark. The duets themselves are intimate, tender and full of unresolved conflict. This requires a sense of deep interiority as well as physical strength, lightness and dexterity on the part of the dancers, who effectively become actors as well, albeit silent ones – a silence that only intensifies the yearning in their fleeting exchanges.

 

The sense of intimacy is supported by the elegantly minimalist costumes – designed by Linda Chow and realised for this production by Nicole Marrington – and the even more minimalist set and lighting. The dancers wear non-gender-specific casual indoor clothing, including socks rather than bare feet or shoes, all of which adds to the sense of domesticity. It’s as if we’re in series of rooms, even though there’s no furniture or carpeting – an effect that’s ironically heightened by staging the work outdoors. 

 

Lighting is provided by floodlights on stands which are initially positioned in an arc upstage and then moved around peripherally by the dancers while fading up or down (these lights are augmented by overheads on the rear balcony of the Courtyard that become barely noticeable once the work begins). The effect is subtle but adds to the sense of shifting and changing energy and partnerships.

 

The overall atmosphere of melancholy is underscored by the use of ambient music by Cliff Martinez from the soundtrack to the film Solaris (the Stephen Soderberg version, not the Tarkovsky), with its mournful sheen of synthesized strings and soft tuned percussion, which adds another layer of continuity to the work, gently taking us ‘elsewhere’ than the Courtyard, and inside the heads and bodies of the dancers.

 

Pite is evidently interested in the physical and emotional connections and disconnections between as well as within human beings. The dancers’ movements, gestures, and postures – pushing, pulling, grasping, hugging, holding, releasing, falling, rising, standing, walking, crawling and even sitting at the edge of the stage with their backs to us – express a vast range of possible scenarios involving physical or emotional rescue as well as loss, its inevitable counterpart. In fact this overarching ‘duet’ between rescue and loss is arguably the theme of the entire work.

 

Ten Duets lasts for about fifteen minutes but has more content and coherence than most hour-long dance manifestos. 

See it if you can.

 

 *

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary dance incorporating elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.