NEW VERSE

DANCE

17 Aug

Recently landed: New Verse

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Bodytorque program especially for Fjord Review.

Under a sturgeon supermoon, I head to Transit Dance in Brunswick, to see the Australian Ballet’s annual Bodytorque program of new contemporary works. Were I in a different hemisphere, such a bright night would symbolise the start of the harvest season, which, I guess, is true of the Bodytorque choreographic showcase: a gathering of crops, this year from Jill Ogai, Mason Lovegrove, Timothy Coleman, Serena Graham, Benjamin Garrett, and winner of the 2020 Emerging Female Classical Choreographer, Xanthe Geeves.

After two years of Bodytorque inhabiting an exciting, egalitarian digital realm, we’re shifting someplace else now. Benedicte Bemet is no longer sat alone in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, but alone on the stage, albeit momentarily. Bemet, with an air of casual restlessness meets inward reflection, is waiting as the audience finds their seats. She is soon joined by Karen Nanasca, Luke Marchant, Aya Watanabe, et al. and they each take turns peeling off from the group. Seats found. Lights down. Quiet falls. Begin, in time. Whose time? Yours, of course. When you’re ready.

From the internal world of 2020’s Forma, this time, for Bodytorque 2022, choreographer Jill Ogai is looking at the internal rhythms of six dancers who “have no relationship to the dystopian and expansive lines of Rosa Clifford’s composition, Lines of a Consistent Hue.”[i] But this, like all things, is not where we stay. The next landscape is different again. It wriggles and fizzes. And with your hands you can draw the up and down of an elevator shifting floors, shifting states. With tiny fists, and arms in high and close, the appearance of bubbles, slowly coming to the surface. “Here,” explains Ogai, “the dancers are right on the music, the two bouncing together as equals.”

[i] Jill Ogai, in time synopsis, The Australian Ballet Bodytorque program, 2022.