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Year of Chunky Move Premiere: 2005
Premiere
Season Credits
Performers:
Creative
Personnel
- Direction and Concept: Prue Lang
- Dramaturgy: Rebecca Groves
- Text: Jorge Luis Borges
- Rehearsal Assistant: Amy Raymond
- Stage Manager: Briony Leivers
- Lighting Technician: Jenny Hector
- Produced by: Das TAT/ Bockenheimer depot and Kunstfest Weimar
Concept
Site-specific works have played an important role in the history of Chunky Move's work. Infinite Temporal Series continues to explore the important shifting relationship between audience and performance. It also defines the performance as a unique event where everyone's experience is different. Audiences as well as performers make conscious choices of where and when to be still and watch and when to move to another place within an intimate choreographic installation.
We are very proud and excited to present Prue's Infinite Temporal Series at our home with a cast of Australian Dancers... Most intersting for me is that this work is simultaneously an experiment and a poem. It is both clinically precise and delicately fragile. It is alive, forever changing and never repeating, and best of all, you are generously placed inside of it.
Gideon Obarzanek, Artistic Director, Chunky Move
The set is a self-contained performance space consisting of a row of five adjacent rooms with two corridors along each side. Each room contains a bench for audience seating. While each spectator is situated in an intimate relationship to the performers in their particular room, they are also afforded a view beyond that room's immediate confines that penetrates the multiple layers of space and movement in subsequent rooms.
Spectators can move freely from room to room during the performance to construct their own individual and multi-perspectival experience of the work. Within this intimate environment, discontinuities of perception emerge as the pursuit of form becomes a technical inquiry of time. The tension between the perspectival framing of the space and the circular choreographic structure produces a meditative experience of temporal simultaneity and duration within a relatively short performance time.
For this piece I was largely inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, in particular a short fiction called "The Garden of Forking Paths". I wanted to explore performance via experimental narrative structures of simultaneous temporalities, and consequently designed a performance space based on the literary device - mise-en-abyme. While each spectator is situated in an intimate relationship to the performers in their particular room, they are also afforded a view beyond these immediate confines that penetrates the multiple layers of space and movement in subsequent rooms
I developed the choreography from the memory of dreams in which the flow of consciousness gives an altered sense of time and chronology. The circular choreographic structure exists within this intimate environment and discontinuities of perception emerge as the pursuit of form becomes a technical inquiry of time. The spectator has the possibility to change places throughout the performance to construct their own individual and multi-perspectival experience of the work.
Prue Lang, Choreographer / Director
Media
Response
Borges narrative inspires a moving dream
THE AUSTRAIAN
April 12, 2005
Review by Lee Christofis
Australian choreographer Prue Lang has spent nearly 10 years in Europe, the past five collaborating and performing with William Forsyth, who revolutionised ballet technique in the most shocking, contemporary ways.
Infinite Temporal series looks nothing like any Forsythe work seen in Australia during the past few years but is informed by his creative methods. It is made with a perfectionist’s microscopic gaze, evaluating and editing the dancer’s responses to specific investigative tasks, and shaped to insinuate itself into the viewer’s mind.
The rewards in this transfixing 25-minute work, with images of bodies in a field of seemingly limitless space, are glorious, enduringly so.
The Garden of Forking Paths, a novel by Jorge Luis Borges, is the inspiration for Infinite: Lang reflects on Borge’s notions of simultaneous temporalities, and explores dreams intersecting with consciousness and narrative form in dance. She invited the viewer to construct a personal narrative by observing several dances simultaneously.
Crucial to Lang’s concept is her design, an arcade of five rooms, each with a large, unglazed window, through which viewers – 30 at a time, in three shows a night – are free to move, just as the dancers do.
Sitting in the last room, one can see the entire vista, as if through a series of proscenia or a hall of mirrors. The effect is of seeing multiple images filled with potential scenarios.
When all nine dancers move, each with different gestures but all at once, Tiepolo’s ceilings come to mind. In stasis, the dancer could be Caravaggio or Vermeer portraits: quiet but loaded, seen against the furthermost wall on which ripe, persimmon-coloured light is projected, then smudged or blackened with charcoal.
Holding all of this together are fragments of Borges’s text and perfectly sympathetic sonics by Deadbeat, Ekkehard Ehlers and Stephan Mathieu.
Infinite is an entirely contemporary creation yet suggests older associations such as Tai Chi, in which different body parts rotate around different axes, cohering into one fluid expression.
At other times the movement is lyrical, searching, but never soft; or driven, springy and even jerky, as if pulled around by elastic twanging inside the dancers’ bodies.
Clearly, this synthesis of Lang’s ideas is not just about movement; it demands much more than the dancers’ kinaesthetic intelligence and investment in the smallest detail.
Lang has drawn from them all of the depths of emotion and sensitivity that are dramatically transformative.
Infinite Temporal Series is a gift to every dancer in it: Kristy Ayre, Fiona Cameron, Antony Hamilton, Paea Leach, Jo Lloyd, Ryan Lowe, Carlee Mellow, Byron Perry and Claire Peters.
Interactive gem, from any angle
The Age
April 8, 2005
Review by Hilary Crampton
In Infinite Temporal Series expatriate Australian Prue Lang immerses the audience in an infinitely intriguing experience. It is deliberately intimate, with the tiny audience situated in close proximity to the dancers in a series of rooms, each with a bench along one wall. Each room has a frame in the back wall, allowing the audience to see through to the next, or look back towards the first. Audience members are encouraged to move from one room to the next, though it can be equally satisfying to remain in one place throughout the 35-minute presentation.
At first, it feels like one of those lessons in the art of perspective, with the performers diminishing in size, becoming more remote the further they are distanced from the viewer. A dancer stands motionless in each room. All begin slowly and simultaneously with a slow twist, drawing a languorous hand up the front of the body to reach upwards, then stepping out into a sweeping spiral. One is caught between watching the close-up detail of the proximal dancer, or enjoying the synergy of the ensemble.
The dancers maintain a distanced focus, but we can see the tremble of muscles, the flicker of eyelashes, and hear the harsh breathing as they are pulled or projected violently by some apparently external force. Over this, one dancer addresses his audience in a gentle treatise on being and not being. The words appear to have no direct relationship to the action, but somehow influence our thinking.
Gradually the dancers introduce different movements so that we see contrasts in energy or direction from a single dancer, set against the synchronicity of the group. The intricacy increases, but we have been led into it slowly, learning to enjoy the multiplicity of choices. The serendipitous intrusions of audience members as they move from one room to another, taking up positions to look forward or backwards to see through to the front room become framed like portraits. We see our neighbours in a new light – unwittingly becoming performers in a completely unthreatening way.
This is a profoundly satisfying work, carefully polished – not to be missed.
Performance
History
For details of Infinite Temporal Series Performance History,
please click
here.
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