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Year of Premiere: 1997
Premiere Season
Credits
Performers:
Creative Personnel
- Choreography: Gideon
Obarzanek
- Music & Sound Design: Supersonic
- Set Design: Andrew Carter
- Costume Design: Brett Chamberlain
- Lighting Design: Stephen Wickham
- Rehearsal Director: Georgia Shepperd
Production Crew
- Production Manager: Rebecca Palmer
- Stage Manager: Annette Dale
Introduction
Bonehead was the first work presented by Chunky Move as Victoria’s
new flagship contemporary dance company.
Choreographer’s
Notes
If Bonehead were a book it would be both a novel and a reference book.
While there are narratives and characters throughout the piece, there
is also an analysis taking place – of the body as a utilitarian
being or object. At one time the body is able to be a hilarious caricature
of a vulnerable victim, while at another, it is seen number-crunching
frenetically through virtuosic movement combinations, reducing it to
a
mechanician of bone, sinew and muscle.
Media Response
“Disturbing, poignant and exhilarating. For its physicality alone,
Bonehead is breathtaking to watch; enthralling for the daring skill of
the dancers who scale and hang from walls, link bodies like circus gymnasts
and generally hurl themselves about in acutely choreographed sequences
that look quite terrifyingly spontaneous,” SYDNEY MORNING HERALD.
“These are not just any old dances; they are multifaceted, scripted
chunks of cartoon animation, hyper-real theatrics and dangerous, slamming
duets timed to the nanosecond… from Bonehead’s beginning,
it’s clear nothing escapes Obarzanek’s eye -– from New
Age relaxation techniques to econospeak ratbagery and blunt sexual fantasy,” THE
AUSTRALIAN.
‘Karate chops, tyre skids and pinball machines merge in a cacophony
of boisterous rivalry…the abstract choreography .. is fast and furious,” HERALD
SUN.
Other Response
By Mark Davis (Author Of Gangland: Cultural Elites And The New Generationalism)
If dance is usually performed in certain sorts of auditoriums, in certain
parts of towns, to certain types of audiences, and if the way in which
dance is generally talked about confirms to a set of rules and genres,
then these traditional cultural frameworks by themselves aren’t
adequate to contain Bonehead. This is dance for the last 1990s. It is
dance that has walked in off the street, and which speaks to the way
you
and I live.
If dance is to do with the way bodies interact with cultural meanings,
then Bonehead dares to speak about contemporary life. It asks what bodies
themselves mean in contemporary culture. What kind of cultural artifact
is a body? What kinds of spaces do bodies occupy in a post-modern, media-saturated,
image-driven world? One way Gideon Obarzanek’s choreography asks
these questions is to turn some of dance’s conventions upside down.
Bonehead upsets the traditional relationship between dance and music.
Not only does Supersonic’s music sometimes lead the production,
it also editorialises.
Satire isn’t usually seen in dance but Bonehead manages this as
well, alongside savage political commentary. It achieves these things
and more, not through tricks and gimmicks, but with an acuteness, spontaneity
and unashamed sexiness from its dancers, that is itself a commentary
on
traditional dance.
But Bonehead isn’t somehow outside the history of dance. Instead,
it’s an important moment in that history, from an important company
and choreographer, who threatens to take dance to new audiences. This
is dance out on a limb. The spectacle and daring are arresting.
Performance History
Click here for
details of Bonehead’s performance history.
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