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Year of Premiere: 2000
Credits
Premiere Season Performers
Musicians
- Piano: Michael Kieran Harvey
- Violin: Miwako Abe
Creative Personnel
Choreographer’s
Notes
Hydra is a sensual work, more concerned with the emotional landscape than
form and structure. Loosely inspired by the Greek myth of the same name,
Hydra immerses its audience in a dual world of seduction and devastation.
Hydra is like a slow act of drowning, both succumbing to and fighting
off the sense of being lost to the watery depths.
The Greek myth of Hydra tells of Heracles battling the many-headed feminine
water monster, offering an analogy for man’s desire to control,
and resulting struggle with, Nature. This myth is thought to have originated
from Lerna, where in ancient times the water table rose uncontrollably
and springs broke through the earth, devastating the agricultural community
that lived there. Each time the springs erupted the farmers would cap
them with fired clay unknowingly causing the pressure to build up and
burst through at another location.
Heracles’ destruction of Hydra records another historical event
pertinent to this work - the attempted suppression of fertility rites
performed by the pagan priestesses of Lerna. This tale tells of women
being suppressed for engaging in their subversive rituals, but rather
than preventing the practice, each season would see more women emerge
as an irrepressible force.
This production is not a narrative of either the myth or the events from
which the story originated. Rather, Hydra is a reflection of man’s
struggle or conflict with Nature and its seductive and furious forces
that haunt our imagination.
In scale and execution Hydra is ambitious, as well as being physically
demanding; the work is performed on a set that breaks down to reveal a
dark water pool containing 2,600 litres of water. Working with water posed
a number of artistic and logistical challenges and, in this respect, the
collaboration with inventive design company Bluebottle was intense. The
set attempts to encapsulate the inherent tension between the forces of
nature and the constructed world of man.
Media
Response
"Rather than the usual jumble of flash, flesh and ultra-sophisticated
post-modern artifice, Hydra is wrought from good old fashioned ideas.
Its as thoughtful and refined as dance gets," FINANCIAL REVIEW.
"Simultaneously seductive and threatening,” THE AUSTRALIAN.
“A trance-like scenario alternating between images of a violent
drowning and passive capture,” HERALD SUN
“Chunky Move’s Hydra can best be described as an exercise
in Chinese water torture. It’s slow-moving and turgid, like a leaky
pipe, with megalitres of the stuff spilling across the stage. And yet,
this water work is also visually stunning, intriguing and wonderfully
imaginative…like an interrupted dream – beautiful, puzzling
and tantalisingly incomplete,” THE ADVERTISER.
“Hydra will divide the audiences. To take a personal example, I
enjoyed it – while my companion is planning a serious act of revenge
against me for wasting an evening of his life,” SYDNEY MORNING HERALD.
“Enthrallingly different for the adventurous audience member and
bewildering unsettling for those of more mainstream tastes. A handful
of older patrons stood and departed during the opening night performance.
It apparently did not fit snugly into their preconceptions of armchair
‘dance,’” THE MANLY DAILY.
“Innovative dance company Chunky Move drowns in a swamp of its own
making with Hydra…Chunky Move dives in head-first, but fails to
make a splash,” SUNDAY HERALD SUN.
“If your idea of entertainment includes watching a few dancers wallow
in a big puddle for the best part of an hour, Hydra could be the show
for you,” THE AGE.
Performance
History
Click here for
details of Hydra’s performance history.
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