The Australian 5 Sep 2006
Shadows tortured by light
The Australian, Arts, Reviews
Review by Lee Christofis
5 September 2006
NEARLY two years ago, Chunky Move dance company's Artistic Director put a question to a man who would become his newest and perhaps most radical collaborator to date, German real-time interactive software engineer Frieder Weiss. The question was whether one could illuminate the isolated body of a dancer in the dark.
The result of their collaboration, a 25-minute work entitled Glow, is a tour de force that will live long in the memory. Like many of Obarzanek's previous works, Glow is not a narrative but generates deep emotional responses. It's not dancey but is still demandingly, multifariously physical.
The plain context - a white floor panel framed by a black surround, a screen to dance on, in fact - belies the complexity that unfolds on it as light and projections dress the dancer's body as it shapes itself into loose, akimbo poses or taut, distorted forms that fill nightmares. All these shapes, and the movement between them, are recorded electronically and manipulated in ways that refract the dance in different ways.
Sometimes the white floor goes black and, clad in white Lurex leotard, the dancer's body splatters across the floor like a reverse Rorschach blot.
Beams of harsh white light dissect the space geometrically and glaring bands pour down to outline the prone dancer's body like paint.
Miraculously, a spiral hologram pattern frames a new dance, then, paradoxically, shadows the curvilinear paths the dance takes, confounding the viewer's question of who or what triggers each new image. Subtler, almost imperceptible, are the fluctuating contour lines that appear on the dancer's exposed skin as her body rises and falls.
The clearest point at which humanity, imagination and technology meet is when, in another of Weiss's spectacular devices, the dancer falls to the white floor, leaving a black shadow behind.
The shadow rises and pursues the dancer, and is joined, ominously, by new shadows that emerge each time she touches the floor.
Images of anguish, impotence or exhilaration generate a level of excitation and empathy that eluded Obarzanek in his recent, grandly constructed Singularity, with its clever magic-box set and six dancers. Kristy Ayre created Glow's initial movement with Obarzanek, but I saw 22-year-old Sara Black perform it. Her presence, raw energy and intuitive, visceral impulses brought Glow's mesmerising imagery and cumulative urgency into throbbing theatrical life.
Excellent sound, which forces itself into the viewer's hearing almost subliminally, was created by Luke Smiles. Paula Levis designed the sole, light-capturing costume.