FORCES OF NATURE

DANCE

8 Sept

Recently landed: Forces of Nature

Gracia’s written response to Rhiannon Newton’s Explicit Contents especially for Fjord Review.

Explicit content may refer to a parental advisory warning label used by the music industry, but add an ‘s’ to ‘content’ and it is more likely that the explicit contents choreographer Rhiannon Newton is referring to come from the physical act of unfurling something to reveal what lies within.

The Latin origin of the words, explicitus est liber, translate as ‘to unfold’ or ‘to roll out’. They are the closing words of a manuscript. Today’s “The End.” You have unrolled the text, absorbed the knowledge, and in doing so, your action has rendered the information, the contents, ‘explicit’ to the world. Just as explicit implies an unfolding across space, laid out before us, and the light that is required to read what is laid out before us, so too does Newton’s Explicit Contents (2021), on the night of its Melbourne premiere.

Explicit Contents began before we entered Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre, with dancers David Huggins and Ivey Wawn inhabiting the space. Each in their own world, yet connected, feeling the space. Ready to unfurl, in the light. Newton invites us, the audience, “to feel, in a bodily kind of way, how we are part of the environment and how the environment continues inside us. I almost imagine we share a nervous system,”[i] she explains. If within each and every one of us there is a central and peripheral nervous system that works together to communicate sensory information and needs to the body, imagine the exhilarating charge of sensory information if we connected all those receptors together in the one scroll, one space. Not a chain of impulses, but a theatre of impulses bubbling messages back and forth!

[i] Rhiannon Newton in interview, “Campbelltown Arts Centre creates a hub of dance for Sydney Festival 2021”, Dance Informa, accessed 1st September, 2022.