GHOSTLY FIGURES

DANCE

16 Oct

Recently landed: Ghostly Figures

Gracia’s written response to three dance works presented as part of the 2024 Melbourne Fringe Festival, especially for Fjord Review.

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Seated on the floor before an overhead projector, Arabella Frahn-Starkie could be in her studio, working, sifting, collaging, thinking. In a darkened theatre, as befits the lumens of the projector, Frahn-Starkie slides image after image across the flatbed, and in doing so, she animates them and ensures they remain unfixed to any one moment or meaning. With her back to the audience, Pictures and Ghosts begins with an overriding sense of having crept into the artist’s studio to unassumingly watch her process. Music playing softly, to her right, so as not to obscure the hum of the projector, enhances this sensation of Frahn-Starkie being alone in the studio, ruminating. A lidded, expanding document holder to her left.

Memories of another time tap at my shoulder as I watch her work. The projector was one of the tools I especially loved to use at art school in the mid to late nineties, creating collages by overlaying different transparencies[i] run through the colour photocopier. My mind wonders, are these the ‘pictures’ and ‘ghosts’ of the title? Projected pictures made by equipment that is now largely relegated to the past, save for a niche fanbase[ii] that will always love the unique parameters of a condenser. Seated in the Guild Theatre, University of Melbourne, for a restaging of Frahn-Starkie’s work, which was first presented at Dancehouse, Melbourne and Platform Arts, Geelong in 2022, the pictures and ghosts are many and varied. In the second week of the 2024 Melbourne Fringe Festival, ghost technology and memory traces, from the personal to the universal, link this work with two the following night, Callum Mooney’s Cosmos, and Alix Kuijpers’s Grim Grinning Ghosts, presented at Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre, and Skylab, respectively.

[i] Overhead transparencies/dry acetate films

[ii] Replacement components and bulbs are becoming more expensive and harder to source.