Mortal Engine

A dance-video-music-laser performance

"Gideon Obarzanek's latest work is challenging and daring... intensities of light and sound that makeMortal Engine something of a bodysnatcher. It physically invades the viewer" - The Australian

"Obarzanek's depth and breadth of inquiry is stimulating" - The Australian

"Obazanek and his technical team have created a seductive, intriguing piece of entertainment in Mortal Engine" - The Sydney Morning Herald

MORTAL ENGINE INVITED TO THE

2008 EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

The Edinburgh Playhouse

August 17-19, 2008

www.eif.co.uk

World Premiere
The Sydney Festival
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
January 17-20, 2008

Duration: 50 minutes

Warning this production contains smoke, laser and strobe lighting effects and loud volume audio.

Premiere Season Credits:

Performers

Creative Team

Direction and Choreography Gideon Obarzanek

Interactive System Design Frieder Weiss

Laser and Sound Artist Robin Fox

Composer Ben Frost

Costume Designer Paula Levis

Lighting Designer Damien Cooper

Set Design Richard Dinnen and Gideon Obarzanek

Executive Producer Rachael Azzopardi

Production Manager Richard Dinnen

Technical Operator Nick Roux

Stage Manager Lydia Techenne

Concept

In Mortal Engine, the limits of the human body are an illusion. Emanating from within, crackling light and staining shadows represent the most perfect or sinister of souls. Drawing on the kinetics of the interior, enveloping lasers and movement responsive video projections paint an ever-shifting shimmering world. Within this visually spinning, humming and oozing environment , dancers fluidly exchange and combine form with light around them in a constant state of becoming. Witnessing moments of exquisite cosmological perfection, or grotesque evolutionary accidents of existence, we are ceaselessly driven forwards by the reality of permanent change.

Director's Notes

In Mortal Engine, the limits of the human body are an illusion. Kinetic energy fluidly metamorphoses from the human figure into light image, into sound and back again. Choreography is focused on movement of unformed beings in an unfamiliar landscape searching to connect and evolve in a constant state of becoming. Revealing moments of exquisite cosmological perfection, or grotesque evolutionary accidents of existence, the work is ceaselessly driven forwards by the reality of permanent change. Extruded from this surreal environment are short scenes of ordinary human behaviour, which suggest that the other impressions of the primordial world may be the collective images from a more primitive part of our brains that continues to haunt our contemporary world.

As a development from the original solo GLOW, Mortal Engine looks at relationships, connection and disconnection, isolation and togetherness, in a state of continual flux. Conflicts between the self and shadowy other – the other within as well as the other as the other. Duets are seen as both couples and as singular selves struggling to escape inner darkness – mortality, sexuality, desire.

Soft, expressive sounds are dangerously tensioned between abrasive noise disturbances in Ben Frost’s music. At times delicate beauty can emerge from intense sonic harshness while seductive tones threaten to disintegrate and mushroom into dark clouds of rumbling distortion

Robin Fox’s laser and video images have a brutal and direct relationship to the sound they illustrate and when experienced exclusively, their connection with dance is not immediately apparent. When fed information of the dancers’ movements however, they become a powerful extension and ally to the performers’ bodies and their own capacity for explosive brute force or controlled subtlety.

Created by a team of individual artists, the aesthetic/kinetic world of Mortal Engine is pulled together through the computer engineering of Frieder Weiss. He often claims that as an engineer he has no aesthetic position on the productions he is involved with, however his unique software distinguishes all his work in a very powerful way. Frieder’s interactive systems make it possible for instruments and bodies that generate light, video, sound and movement to all share a common language and respond to each other in real time. Mortal Engine has no pre-rendered video, light or laser images. Similarly the music mix is open allowing various sounds to be completely generated from movement data. In addition, pre-composed phrases are triggered by the dancers’ motion or by the operator in relation to where the performers are in any given sequence. This essentially means that there are no fixed timelines and the production flexes according to the rhythm of the performers. While the scenes are always in the same order, the work is truly live every night, not completely predictable and ever changing.

I would like to thank Reka Szabo and The Symptoms who I worked with in Budapest for a short but intense period of time. In teaching a workshop involving similar technology at the beginning of their rehearsal period for “Nothing There”, shared themes emerged and also differences that helped me clarify my ideas and directions for Mortal Engine. Any possible similarity with elements of our work is of no coincidence.

All Chunky Move productions demand great effort from a large group of people and Mortal Engine is no exception. I am very fortunate to be able to create work with an excellent producing, technical and artistic team within the company and outside. It would not be possible to achieve these works without their great personal initiative and generous collaborative spirit.

Thank you.

Media Response

Sensory assault as fear comes to light

The Australian, Arts, Reviews

By Deborah Jones

January 2008

Gideon Obarzanek’s latest work is challenging and daring. The provocations occur on a number of levels, the most obvious of which are the intensities of light and sound that make Mortal Engine something of a bodysnatcher. It physically invades the viewer.

On a more intellectual level, the ways in which living bodies interact with, direct or are directed by extremely sophisticated technologies raise questions about our humanity and what the future might hold.

Mortal Engine is a development of techniques created by interactive system designer Frieder Weiss, seen n the wonderful 2006 solo Glow, in which a dancer’s movements trigger light patterns and sounds that appear to take on a life of their own. The connections between the substance and the shadow are deeply absorbing as inner thoughts and impulses are made visible, rendering the performer vulnerable.

Glow is a soft word; Mortal Engine gives off a much harder-edged vibe and is indeed an entirely tougher proposition. Six dancers – Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, Amber Haines, Antony Hamilton, Lee Serle and Charmene yap – swarm on and tumble about a tilted platform that’s also a canvas for intricate patterns of light. The bodies are bathed, outlined, defined and often blotted out. They are also battered by swirls of rods raining down relentlessly. Once more, inner impulses seem to be made visible but the atmosphere is dark and troubling, as if we can see people literally struggling with themselves. From time to time a panel rises to make a vertical bed for a couple who, if you like, represent reality and with whom the audience can identify in some way. Mostly, though, the world of Mortal Engine feels like an alternative universe directed by an intelligence that is not entirely benign.

As with Glow, there are images in light to take your breath away, and not just with their visual beauty. At one point in Mortal Engine, figures force their way through a field of precisely laid-out bars of light, the pattern disturbed by their movement and then restored as they pass on. The ebb and flow of scurrying little balls of light around a dancer is intriguing for what it implies about energy given and received; at the same time it is quite disorientating and disconcerting.

Such moments come again and again, although not everything holds the attention equally. Perhaps this is just the dance-lover talking, but a couple of episodes in which light and sound take over almost completely seem to me chilly and less satisfying than the sections in which movement is an equal partner. Nevertheless, Obazanek’s depth and breadth of inquiry is stimulating. You wouldn’t recognise Mortal Engine as coming from the creator of I Want to Dance Better at Parties or Tense Dave. The Chunkies are always on the move.

Chunky Move is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria Department of Premier and Cabinet and the commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.