<SINGULARITY

In the course of a lifetime, the average person will spend six months stuck in traffic, nine months ironing clothes, four months queuing at the supermarket and two weeks riding in lifts.

In these blank spaces of everyday life passions or anxieties, normally held in check, may erupt in less than a second.

Singularity is a physical exhibition of emotional states. Extended and expanded from brief surges these states are viewed up close. You are invited to wander between simultaneous performances set on a series of ever-shifting stages.

Director’s Notes

Recently I was looking at the work of Thomas Demand, an artist who painstakingly creates intricate paper and card models of mundane civic, work and private spaces. In viewing Demand’s detailed work I began to think of the uninteresting and familiar places where I spend much of my time yet pay little attention to. It is precisely in these familiar places, these gaps between engagement with the world around me, that I have sometimes experienced brief moments of the most profound happiness, sadness, fear and pleasure.

As a choreographer, I have become increasingly envious of literature’s ability to describe people’s dramatic states of mind while they are doing nothing or at most, very little. Dance can only describe through action and similar to theatre’s limitation, where characters are restricted to dialogue to express themselves, emotions in dance are almost exclusively revealed through the body in motion. Pretty obvious stuff, however when I have experienced moments of intense emotions I have often not been in particularly interesting situations or places. My body has been mostly still and the actual sensory experience quite brief.

In September 2005, Chunky Move was invited for a residency at the National Gallery of Australia to study a Bill Viola exhibition, The Passions, while continuing our development of Singularity. Viola’s work centred on studying people’s changing emotions with very high-speed cameras. The results were extreme slow motion, very high definition video portraits. Not only were the works compelling but so were the people viewing them. It seemed that the observers often adopted the emotions displayed on the screens. Apart from the works and their fascinating, contagious phenomenon, another inspiration was part of a lecture by Viola about the making of his work. He talked about the need to find time and space for isolation and the importance of loneliness. He was speaking about the state an artist needs to access to make work, but it also struck me as similar to the moments that can occur in those mundane places and situations in life, gaps between engagement where there is space for emotions to surge to the surface, if only briefly.

I would like to thank everyone involved with the project, particularly the dancers who have personally contributed so much in the development of this work. And a special thank you to architect, Dirk Zimmermann from Studio 505, whose work has uniquely defined how we view this performance.

Gideon Obarzanek

Media Response

Postures and gestures

The Age

May 20, 2006

Hilary Crampton

Chunky Move's Singularity has much of what we have come to expect from Gideon Obarzanek, a choreographer who escapes the confines of a codified vocabulary of movement, says Hilary Crampton.

''SINGULAR" APTLY describes Gideon Obarzanek, whose choreography has provoked controversy, fed fashion, shifted boundaries and ruffled feathers since before he and his company Chunky Move took up residence in Melbourne in 1997.

His most recent work, Singularity, at North Melbourne Town Hall delivers some of the things we have come to expect: obsessive fixations, inventive design, unusual performance structures, and extraordinarily committed performances from his dancers. But it also shows his ability to pursue distinctive dance ideas outside of conventional paradigms and escape the confines of a codified movement vocabulary.

In Singularity Obarzanek has drawn on literary conventions and observations from a residency at the National Gallery of Australia. He presents six hypercharged emotional themes, repeated as if on a tape-loop.

Each dancer is confined to a small arena - a raised platform or a sunken pit - with the audience milling around like attendees at a gallery or the zoo.

The effect is paradoxical - one of both immediacy and objectivity, as if the dancers are mere artefacts. Some of Obarzanek's signature elements are evident - sudden gymnastic manoeuvres, inherent violence, exaggeration- but the movement language is largely reduced to postures and gestures. Again it seems paradoxical - minimal action excessively delivered.

Exaggeration has perhaps been the most consistent element of Obarzanek's choreography. Who could forget those grotesque, bone-jarring, joint-cracking characters in Bonehead (1997), Kathryn Dunn's skeletally thin bag lady, Brett Daffy's rubber-limbed parking cop and sleazy voyeur.

In every instance the performers invested deeply in their characterisations - a mark of Chunky Move performances. Despite Obarzanek's controversial decision not to maintain a permanent ensemble, he has attracted a solid cohort of regular performers who have delivered extraordinarily committed performances - often working in ways that seemed inherently dangerous.

In recent years there has been an observable shift in the mood and tenor of Obarzanek's choreography away from the bleak worlds and black humour of early work towards more riotous humour and a gentler probing of human foibles.

Revisiting early works such as Fast Idol (1995) and Bonehead, the violence still seems shockingly gratuitous. The referencing to cartoon characters and computer games was fashionable but also troubling. Even then Obarzanek could contrive cleverly mixed signals, as in the violent wrestling match between two of the protagonists in All the Better to Eat you With (1999), while handling with gentle care a small live kitten.

In his early works Fast Idol, Corrupted (1998), and Crumpled (2000), women seemed to be represented in callously simplistic or exposing ways. In Corrupted a corps of blonde-wigged, baby-doll-gowned women tottered in vapid vacuousness, belying any agency in their own lives. In Crumpled, women repeatedly hurled themselves at each other, their expressions vacant, their actions like automatons.

Hydra (2000) was another example of bleak obsession exploring the relationship between man and nature, with the role of Hydra - the all-consuming goddess of water - given to the women. The movement was still very much in the vein of that hard-edged, angular style now designated as the Melbourne look, featured also in the work of choreographers Lucy Guerin, Phillip Adams and Rebecca Hilton.

More recent works, Wanted: Ballet for a Contemporary Democracy (2002), Tense Dave (2003), and I Want to Dance Better at Parties (2005), have presented a different face in both mood and dance style. Instead of the deliberately emotionless disengagement of earlier works there is a greater connection between the performers, and between performers and audience.

Tense Dave, which earned the company a coveted Bessie choreographic award in New York, was a collaboration between Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Michael Kantor that presented well-known dancers in a different light.

The diminutive Michelle Heaven proved to have a fine sense of comedy, while the coolly beautiful Stephanie Lake delivered full-on Victorian melodrama with a joyful zest.

I Want to Dance Better at Parties arose out of research for a documentary on the relationship of men with dance. It is a gentle and heart-warming essay - probing and celebratory - that incorporates many dance styles, though capped off by risky, high-velocity action.

Obarzanek's fine sense of irony had full play in Wanted: Ballet for a Contemporary Society, which takes the Mickey out of policies that impose managerialist strategies on the arts.

Strong design has always been a feature of Obarzanek's work and has often been instrumental in orchestrating the audience. Sets that move the dancers, locations that demand the audiences move, forcing them into social interaction with their neighbours, have all changed our understanding of how a dance performance might look.

If there seems to be one consistent aspect to Obarzanek's work it is a tendency towards obsession - a concentrated focus on limited movements that are repeated or exaggerated.

Singularity has all those features, and in some senses it weakens the power of the work. The repetitive emotive themes, the reliance on exaggerated breathing to define emotional states and impose a rhythm, ultimately lose power through familiarity. It is a troubling work in many ways, placing such demands on the dancers that one fears for their emotional wellbeing, but the stunning design and clever manipulation of the audience still demonstrate that Obarzanek is a singular if obsessive talent.

Now well established in that fabulous piece of rusted architectural sculpture adjacent to the Malthouse, Chunky Move has become a Melbourne institution, a hub around which many other dance events revolve, generously allowing independent artists access to administrative support and an audience following. Chunky Move opening nights have become a feature of the Melbourne arts scene. Whether one loves or hates his work, Gideon Obarzanek has definitely shifted the deck chairs of contemporary dance.