Sydney festival: TEMPEST: without a body
LOUD NOISE warn the signs at the doors to the Everest Theatre. They’re not kidding. The last time my ears hurt this badly and for so long afterwards was after an Iron Maiden gig. The soundtrack of choreographer Lemi Ponifasio’s acclaimed work, Tempest: without a body, is one of the many challenges of its 90 minutes. Beginning with a leap-out-of-your-skin wall of sound and continuing through varieties of white noise that would have been familiar to inmates of Northern Ireland’s H Blocks, it is almost entirely mechanical, inhuman and divorced from the humans on the stage. These dancers are in turn dwarfed by the immensity of the stage whose cavernous appearance is trickily enhanced by the all-encompassing blackness of the minimal set and geometric white lighting.
An angel who is described elsewhere as having “a broken body and crumpled wings too small for flight” is represented in this production by the sole female presence and that’s a challenge in itself. All the angel does is creep about the stage and utter a series of unearthly primal screams. Is she mourning her lot as the token female? Or the lot of women in society at large? Hard to say. And hard to take.
There are some beautiful sequences of breathtakingly slow and disciplined movement by individual dancers and also a (probably unintentional) demonstration of how geisha achieve that amazing smooth, gliding walk. There were undoubtedly layers of cultural meaning and south Pacific colonial history that were lost on me – and on many in the opening night audience if the tepid response was any gauge – and that’s a pity. Nevertheless, there was no need to translate the endless repetition of not very much movement that stretched the 90 minutes to what felt like many, many more.
Whomever wrote the blurb for the show reckons it’s a “frighteningly beautiful reflection on the post-9/11 world” which seems like another way of saying “Don’t really have a clue, but 9/11 is always good for an otherwise inexplicable violent/post-apocalyptic/urban miasma.”
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The underlying violence of the piece echoes the warlike aggro associated with Maori culture and is highlighted through an oration by activist-elder, Tame Iti. It could have benefited from surtitles, if enlightenment rather than arrogant obfuscation had been the goal, but the message was fairly plain. Unfortunately for me, it was an all too vivid reminder of an evening on a Sydney street when I was attacked, without provocation, by a young Maori man with the same in-your-face viciousness, disdain, spitting plus, on that occasion, some revolting sexual insults. Okay, so Queen Victoria’s mob did the dirty at Waitangi. So get over it.
