RIPPLE EFFECT

DANCE

17 Mar

Recently landed: Ripple Effect

Gracia’s written response to Angela Goh’s Sky Blue Mythic, for Fjord Review.

Things open where they began, in a loop, only I don’t know it yet. In measured steps, Angela Goh walks diagonally across the stage. She studies the audience, her focus fixed, unblinking. Upon an exposed, brightly lit stage, it could be said she is comparatively exposed, but her unflinching focus says otherwise. In the quiet of the Sylvia Staehli Theatre, at Dancehouse, for the opening night performance of Sky Blue Mythic, you can hear the noise of the traffic outside. In a work that “is about our relationship to what surrounds us,”[1] the stream of traffic on a Friday night adds to the feeling that Goh has walked into the theatre almost by chance. Cap on, and a tall orange can of Papaya drink in hand, did Goh take a wrong turn and find herself in a symbolic labyrinth on a walk back from the shops?[ii]

“To move through a labyrinth is to explore an unknown space.”[iii] And to move through a labyrinth of ideas, as opposed to a physical labyrinth, is one where symbols take on new meanings. A sundial is a portal to the supernatural; “an avatar is adrift in an unknowable but familiar setting, …[and a body is] an interface of flesh searching for new ways of being.”[iv] Goh falls to her knees, before landing on all fours. The can rolls from her hand, spilling the orange liquid on the stage. Both the fall and spill are as measured and precise as the steps that preceded this tumble. This fall and spill, it transpires, are a part of the loop destined to repeat. A glitch, at first, later interpreted to be a warning about history repeating itself and warning signs missed.

This new full-length version of the work, which was originally created for and won the 2020 Keir Choreographic Award, is my first experience within the labyrinth. As Goh, seated on the floor, begins to size up the audience as an artist before their subject, squinting their eyes, simplifying the values of the scene all the better to know it, I can’t help winking-blinking back. Goh’s winks slowly shift and take on another possible reading as she enters a trance-like state.

[i] Angela Goh, Sky Blue Mythic Artist Statement, Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Sky-Blue-Mythic-Artist-Statement.pdf, accessed 12th March, 2022.

[ii] In reference to Goh’s Artist Statement, “I could write about many things, not limited to: the Romantic Ballet Giselle, Tarkovskyian cinema, the Japanese anime Sword Art Online, the brilliance of Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, the perfection of Malevich’s Red Square.”

[iii]Ethan Weed, ‘A Labyrinth of Symbols: Exploring The Garden of Forking Paths’, https://www.borges.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/1808.pdf, accessed 12th March, 2022.

[iv]“Sky Blue Mythic”, Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/whats-on/sky-blue-mythic-angela-goh/, accessed 12th March, 2022.