CROSSING THE LINE

DANCE

16 June

Recently landed: Crossing the Line

Gracia’s written response to Gideon Obarzanek’s Glow and Sydney Dance Company’s Love Lock by Melanie Lane and Forever & Ever by Antony Hamilton, especially for Fjord Review.

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At the vertical and horizontal intersection of two white lines on a darkened stage, performer Layla Meadows and her corresponding organic outline appears. For this restaging of Glow, a work choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek for the Melbourne Festival in 2006, it is Meadows’s time to be scanned and surveyed in this duet between a dancer and a machine. For the 20th anniversary season of Glow, presented as part of the inaugural Australian Dance Biennial during the 2026 RISING festival, she is being joined by original cast member Sara Black and Melissa Pham. Rolled forward, making a snail shell of her back and tail, Meadows scuttles, propelled by her feet, her head and shoulders anchored to the ground.[i] She interrupts the vertical and horizontal lines with her presence, ensuring they cannot meet. Rather, the straight lines have to go around her, they have to bend. The snail, or is she perhaps more of a hermit crab beneath a shell, is disrupting the meeting point.

Onwards she hastens on the axis. And with this adherence, the sense that she is not in control, that the path is in fact predetermined, dawns. This world, it is one that favours straight lines and known outcomes. The earlier freedom, a blip. Perhaps. In costuming by Paula Levis, with sleeves for protection, crossover neckline for flexibility and glove-like coverage[ii], Meadows maps the illuminated screen of the stage floor, and the machine above scans her every move. There is no visual escape for the hybrid snail meets hermit crab. Flanked by raked seating on all four sides of the stage, the scrutiny is as intense at the sound and lighting (by Luke Smiles/Motion Laboratories).

[i] Sara Black received a Helpmann Award for Best Female Dancer for her performance in Glow in 2006, and has been the rehearsal director for this remounting. Glow received a Helpmann Award for Best Dance Work and a Green Room Award for Design, and has toured festivals and venues worldwide.

[ii] Award-winning costume designer Paula Levis revisits the original costume she created for the 2006 season of Glow now preserved in the Australian Performing Arts Collection at Arts Centre Melbourne, Chunky Move Instagram account, https://www.instagram.com/p/DYy4CtPAWvl/, accessed 28th May, 2026.