PRECARIOUS MOVEMENTS

DANCE

28 Mar

Recently landed: Precarious Movements

Gracia’s written response to Atlanta Eke’s Innocence and Amrita Hepi’s Liable, commissioned by NGV as part of Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum; and Holly Durant’s Alter Edith, at Dancehouse, especially for Fjord Review.

If you believe, you can make yourself into Cerberus the three-headed dog-like monster, who guards the third circle of Hell, the circle of the gluttons, by buttoning together a couple of oversized shirts, and sitting together with two other people, in a huddle on the floor. With three heads close together, you’ll never miss a trick. There is no-one in the assembled audience in the gallery that misses your detection. Or so it feels momentarily in Atlanta Eke’s Innocence.

If you can make the audience believe you can split yourself into three variations of one person, this time a person named Cass about to embark on an audition, you can pull the audience into a state of “playful polyphony, exploring how [the audience] might listen with [their] bodies” when faced with the “unreliable narrator”[i] in triplicate. Or so it feels candidly, momentarily in the impossible spaces Amrita Hepi’s Liable reveals.

If you believe an alien from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere should wish to return to Earth to pour a cocktail and, in turn, pour themselves into a cycle of constricting chartreuse costuming to states of undress and back again, anything is possible. Or so it vibrates, at excruciating volume, in Holly Durant’s “fling the pickle away”[ii] ongoing investigation in Alter Edith.

[i] Amrita Hepi, Liable project notes, Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/triennial/artists-designers/amrita-hepi/, accessed 16th March, 2024

[ii] Holly Durant, Alter Edith programme notes, Season One, Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Alter-Edith-by-Holly-Durant-Program-Notes.pdf, accessed 15th March, 2024.