Wayne Parsons Dance, Meeting and Vestige at The Place 2018

Wayne Parsons Dance, Double Bill: Meeting & Vestige, The Place, April 28

Katie Lusby and Wayne Parsons in an earlier Meeting (photo: ASH)

In his introductory note to the evening’s program, Wayne Parsons writes that the double bill of Meeting and Vestige ‘charts the development of my work over the past 5 years’ and adds that Meeting was the work that launched his company at The Place in Resolution! 2013. If this is point A, and presumably Vestige is the more recent point B, a line can be drawn between them that traces Parsons’ development. So what does this line reveal? An interest in narrative is evident in both works along with the mechanism of memory: in Meeting it is the body memory that dancers employ to recall movement to a particular music, while in Vestige it is the evocation through memory of a person who has died. As a dancer, Parsons would know the former only too well, and perhaps experienced it in the remaking of Meeting with Katie Lusby. In Vestige the three characters closest to the deceased take turns in remembering her in words and action while she illustrates her side of the picture through dance alone. On a more psychological level, the male dancer in Meeting (Parsons himself) and the portrayal of the husband in Vestige both display a chauvinist approach to truth and a rejection of the opinion of others that is often accompanied by a sardonic smile.

Meeting is an accomplished work that in its brief 15 minutes suggests a maturity of conception with an ease of style. It shows the two dancers rehearsing sequences of movement they are in the process of remembering. Body memory is never quite the same for two different bodies, and Meeting plays on this ambiguity. Parsons suggests a phrase and Lusby responds with her version, be it as small as a variation in the hand, or as major as a change in the order of a sequence. Lusby is constantly smiling with the pleasure of going through the motions of remembering while Parsons smiles but often with the pleasure of correcting Lusby and asserting his own recall. The sense of humour in Meeting goes beyond the smiles, however, expressing an evident delight in the physical play and in the gentle one-upmanship on both sides but underneath Parsons subtly modifies the notion of recollection from shared suggestion to a controlling physical manipulation and then to sexual innuendo from which Lusby releases herself in the final gesture. Meeting extracts a number of possibilities from its subject that all are inherent within it and it is Parsons’ seemingly effortless slippage from one to the other while maintaining a consistent choreographic vocabulary that mark the work’s sense of completeness.

All these traits find their way into Vestige with one major difference; the narrative has become literal rather than choreographic. In working with author Ankur Bahl and a dramaturg Pooja Ghai Parsons has allowed the influence of the word to become central to an understanding of the plot and to its reenactment rather than implicit within a choreographic framework. The focus of the story is Livia, a socialite (Grace Jabbari) who relives her posthumous fame as recalled by the three people who were closest to her: husband Killian (Ian Garside), a ‘fan-girl archivist’ named Suki (Sonya Cullingford) and Cath, a ‘needy portrait artist’ (Katie Lusby). The story opens with the death of Livia so her subsequent re-embodiment serves to corroborate or reject the memories of others, like a celebrity biopic in which interviews with friends and family are juxtaposed with live footage and an eclectic playlist (designed by Angus MacRae). Vestige is entirely fictional but it borrows the biopic form to piece together a discordant portrait between the glitter of public life and private despair. Jabbari dances her life while interacting as both subject and object of the others’ verbal memories. Her duet with Garside shifts from a broken waltz of longing for tenderness and attention — “She could only fall in love to a waltz” — to his callous resistance if not rejection. This is where Parsons’ choreographic manipulation provides a link to Meeting and is a powerful image of selective truth. But by the time Jabbari takes the floor in the final sequence the weight of the verbal narrative intrudes too literally on the choreographic invention; collapsing too often evokes breakdown but is not enough to convey the full range of emotional turmoil.

The line from Meeting to Vestige suggests a development of influences in which Parsons’ own initial inspiration has been modified beyond his natural ability to mould it. His strength is to infuse movement with its own power of telling, which is what will give shape once again to memory.

Antony Hamilton & Alisdair Macindoe, Meeting

Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe, Meeting, Battersea Arts Centre, June 28

Alisdair Macindoe and Antony Hamilton in Meeting (photo: Gregory Lorenzutti)

“What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure — as a mere automaton of duty?” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Bodies as automatons? It’s a philosophical question that sits at the heart of choreography. Can dancers deliver the same movement, at the same intensity again and again without deviation or wrinkle? Both Antony Hamilton originating the choreography and Alisdair Macindoe inventing the bots and polyrhythmic composition dissolve the seam between choreography and composition. Their meshing as a performance duo with highly tuned musicality is a feast of call and response and displays acres of tensile strength. Imagine the microseconds before the gun of a 100m race is fired: Macindoe and Hamilton don’t go on the ‘b’ of the bang, they play in the space when the lips begin to close and formulate the hum of the ‘b’.

With the 55 minute performance split into three sections, the first sees Hamilton and Macindoe inhabiting the 4-metre radius circle of bots (64 pieces of wood measuring no more than 20 x 15 x 10 centimtres with a pencil attached to a pivoting mechanism on the side, tapping the floor at different intervals); this intensity of focus and action does not allow our gaze to wander or be distracted by any superfluous activity. It deepens the connection between audience and performers as we’re all submerged in this tight frame for the first 25 minutes; it is relentless adventure with feats of physical and verbal memory.

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” – Theodore Dreiser

Hamilton and Macindoe are human gnomons casting shadows and carving air as they latch on to one of the many polyrhythms created by the orchestra. The primary choreographic language employed is popping (sometimes known as the robot dance), building staccato patterns through the isolation of muscles in their arms, neck and torso. The style ensures a crisp, cool and technically impressive feat yet Macindoe does not match Hamilton’s skill. The difference is clear and Macindoe is not able to execute and pop as the softness of a contemporary training blunts the edges required.

As Hamilton slowly breaks the circle of bots, we see his b-boy history as he softly baby freezes over the boundary of bots, shifting his weight as he meets the floor and begins to reconfigure them into a new formation. With a series of miniature robotic henges casting dawn-length shadows across the stage we began to see and hear a transformation. There is a delicacy in play in the second section — a balance between sound, motion, the sound of motion and the motion of sound. The sonic palette has shifted too as miniature trays, blocks and alternative materials are placed underneath the pencils and as they strike down alternative tones reverberate and the monochromatic drum march has been replaced with a textured soundscape.

“Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music.” – Rabindranath Tagore

Time is often foregrounded; from the unfinished and rewound repeated movements glitching in our eyes, to the complex musical time signatures pulsing in our ears — we know that time exists but are unsure at which speed it is being played out. This invisibility is remembered at the end as the dancers leak off stage and the audience is serenaded for the last five minutes by the orchestra. Even though the bodies are no longer present, the interweaving of choreography and composition ensures a physical residue in the audience memory. As the tones shift I see their bodies echo in the space, popping, patterning and replaying movement sequences that were present a few moments before.

There were dozens of moments of virtuosity: from an eyes-closed verbal recall of a numeric pattern at Mach 1 making them sound like a pair of Australian market traders bamboozling the audience’s ears, to a tight hand sandwich duet at close proximity as they pivot and twist, using their palms as records moving in and out of a jukebox at speed. As an audience we’ve been internally tightened and our gears wound watching these feats without breathing or shuffling in the rich and sparse landscape Hamilton and Macindoe have created. Meeting is a quietly rich encounter between man, machine, motion and sound that rewards your attention with mesmeric human feats and meditative sonic patterns.