LIFE AND AFTERLIFE
Recently landed: Life and Afterlife
Gracia’s written response to Melanie Lane’s Arkadia, especially for Fjord Review.
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In a willingness to explore the mythologies of the afterlife, I find my way to the last of a handful of seats for Melanie Lane’s Arkadia at the Substation. As my eyes adjust to the appropriate dimness of the hereafter, having come in from the brightness of the day, I could be in a cloister-like garden of monasteries or a walled-in castle garden. A veil cast over the scene, I follow the pictorial code of the illuminated manuscript before me. As if transplanted from a copy of The Book of Hours, the margins are decorated with a border of floreate ornament potentially inhabited by a host of fantastical animals my eyes have yet to determine.
In the black beyond, a planet engulfed in flames rotates. I am unsure if the planet is Earth, and a sign of what awaits, or if it is a fireball coming towards Earth, a sign, too, of what awaits. Unsure, in the sense that Lane has created a work in which I feel invited to surrender to meditation, I sit and let the stream of consciousness surround me. I may have been too earthbound in my reading; speculative utopia calling: lean into the virtuosic. Arkadia is the first work presented by Corps Conspirators led by Lane,[i] with an emphasis upon multi-artform collaborations, and it features a 3D animation, developed by Tokyo-based artist Kim Laughton, projected across screens that are interlaced with Eugyeene Teh’s set design (drawn from Marg Horwell’s original set design concept), as well as each of the six performers’ cultural and personal histories. As Lane describes, in Arkadia there are “multiple fictional narratives that interconnect the dancers through a shared experience of physical transformation and mythic conjuring.”[ii]
[i] Melanie Lane, Corps Conspirators, https://melanielane.info/corps-conspirators, accessed 9th June, 2024.
[ii] Melanie Lane in interview with Chris Duncan, 11th May, 2024, DanceLife Australia, https://www.dancelife.com.au/interview-with-melanie-lane-rising-2024/, accessed 9th June, 2024.
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13th of June, 2024
Melanie Lane’s Arkadia, developed at The Substation as part of their In Development program, and presented as part RISING, a festival of new art, performance and music (image credit: Gianna Rizzo)
