cracking it open

Christina Shepard

Cracking It Open is a series of informal dance improvisation showings, and discussions about those showings, dispersed throughout this year. The first one was held at Dancehouse on Sunday the 14th of April. The next two take place on the 14th of July (as part of the Improvisation Festival of Melbourne) and then on the 19th and 20th of October (as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival). Pencil them in your diary, as they are great opportunities to see some of Melbourne’s finest dance improvisers in performance.

As the name suggests, Cracking It Open attempts to demystify some of the secrets around dance improvisation. Its aim is to generate discussion and insight into what enhances and what hinders improvisation practice, as well as to highlight improvisation artists who utilise dance and movement as their primary performance modality.

One of the most striking things about watching a number of people improvise directly after each other is just how people differ in the way they move. What is also striking is how they reveal that movement in the space and what they choose as support in the creation of that movement. Add to this the discussion that then takes place after each performance and it is like receiving further pieces of the puzzle, without removing the mystery of improvisation. Where did that movement come from? What influenced you to make those movement decisions? Why did you choose that particular piece of music? What is your primary drive when you move?

All of the performances for the first showing of Cracking It Open were solos (with the exception of Paul Romano and Beck Reid’s duet that kicked things off) and there is nothing better than a solo to enhance the diversity that abounds. It seems to me that dancing alone allows the performer to make decisions quickly; the work has the potential to be dense; and the focus tends to be on the specific rather than the broad. Of course these things can happen when dancing with others, but with a solo there is a lot of room for idiosyncrasy and the curious freedom of going to a place that the performer may or may not want to enter.

The first showing of Cracking It Open included solo performances by Glynis Angell, Peter Trotman, Sally Smith, Tim Davey, Anne O’Keefe, Suzanne Hurley and Nikki Fletcher, with a duet by Paul Romano and Beck Reid. The informal setting allowed the audience a chance to watch these performers in close-up, and then discuss with them their experience of improvisation.

Paul Romano and Beck Reid opened the showing with a duet that was expansive, dynamic and percussive at times. Rarely in physical contact with each other, their improvisation had the sense of two solos side by side, connecting at times by “sistering” each others’ movement and reacting to each other in the space. They were interested in the “spaces” between moments of interacting, and the risk of knowing, or not knowing, what might happen. Structure, and the scores within that structure, was also a dominant interest.

Glynis Angell’s main interest of the day was character dance and gesture. Coming from a theatre background with an interest in movement, her performance was strongly mimetic. We saw gesture that was universal, domestic and familiar. She relied on facial expressions to carry the emotional content of the improvisation and her body to tell the story. Interested in creating her own rhythm, she chose to perform without music and allow the energy of live performance to create the dance. Peter Trotman created poignant stillnesses within a narrative of movement—he was the main character of his own story, responding to a world that we, the audience, could not see, but certainly existed, and collided and converged with his body—his responses were sometimes mercurial, sometimes skittish and unexpected. He often uses spoken word as part of his improvisation, but this time chose not to, using dramatic music to support the dance instead. I enjoyed his prop—the chair he never seemed to sit on, but by the end of the dance provided a kind of perverse safety.

Sally Smith entered into a hilarious flirtation with an opera singer/dancer straight from a Tanztheatre in Germany. She swept about in a Baroque dress, spoke out in gibberish German and led us through the hills and dales of serious opera. We saw her fluffing her moves and then, with true German grimness, reclaim them. The creation of her character was born of the dress she wore, memories of her time in Germany and a play with language.

Tim Davey offered a pensive and articulate series of scores interrupted by bursts of energetic, swinging and contorted movements. His improvisation included a wide range of movement motifs, motions and progressions that were repeatedly revealed and then discarded. A film sound track (mainly in French) was used to instigate movement possibilities and directions as opposed to providing a primary drive.

Anne O’Keefe opened her improvisation unconventionally by asking the audience to close their eyes. She began with song and (I presume) little movement and then allowed her voice to carry her to movement. Her singing was incredibly powerful and emotive, filling the space formidably. Playing with vocal sounds without words, voice modulation and volume, she created her improvisation from the idea that the voice can move and the body can sing. Both movement and voice originated from a central area of her body that then expanded outward.

Suzanne Hurley presented smooth and constant movement that broke out into discordant shapes which had clear images associated with them. There was a sense that her dance moved from the abstract to the instinctive as she played with time and how the movement moved through time. She chose not to have music accompany the improvisation in order to free herself from the constraints of its timing. She worked with a sense of weight into the ground while she co-ordinated different parts of her body to create a sense of wholeness.

Nikki Fletcher ended the evening with an honest and unveiled play with words and movement that began at the back of the space and ended close to the audience. This mirrored a sense of progressively revealing to us what was going on for her. She bridged the space between her body and the audience by directly commenting on what was changing inside her and the wonder and surprise that came with that. Her improvisation created an intimacy and realness that reflected the intentions of the evening as a whole.

By the end of the showing there was certainly a feeling that the audience was afforded a more intimate look at what drives people to improvise and what processes they chose to facilitate their improvisation. The next Cracking It Open (on the 14th of July) will continue in this vein by cracking open the following performers: Ellie Brickhill, Shelley Lasica, Felicity Macdonald, Shaun McLeod, Martin Kwasner, Angie Potsch, Kate Kennedy, Nick Papas, Bronwyn Ritchie and Danielle von der Borch.

If you would like more information on the up and coming Improvisation Festival of Melbourne, contact Cecil Street Studios on (03) 9443 0640.


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