NOT IN A MILLION YEARS
Not In A Million Years, Force Majeure at Carriageworks, November 18-27, 2010. Main photo: Vincent Crowley and Elizabeth Ryan; right : Sarah Jayne Howard; by Lisa Tomasetti
KATE CHAMPION’S new work opens with a pas de deux so subtle, inventive and heart-stoppingly beautiful it takes your breath away and replaces oxygen with tears and wonder. Not In A Million Years was created by Champion, Roz Hervey and Geoff Cobham and the title refers to the kinds of things that can happen to a person, otherwise ordinarily going about their lives, that you wouldn’t – couldn’t – ever imagine.
So, the opening features Vincent Crowley and Elizabeth Ryan enacting the longest few minutes during which flight attendant Vesna Vulovic went from serving tea and coffee on a mundane flight across Europe to being not only the sole survivor of the terrorist bomb that exploded her plane, but also enduring the 10,000m fall back to earth. She was found, broken but alive, in snow-covered, rural Czechoslovakia and her life thereafter was same, same but different.
Dressed in her neat blue uniform with a perky red kerchief around her throat, Ryan epitomises the way Champion’s Force Majeure company can fashion indelible images and ideas out of the apparently mundane acts and people of the everyday. In this instance the outstanding indelible image is a huge heap of white polystyrene “snow” in which the show’s creators and four dancers perform acts of alchemy. The banks and dunes of tiny white beads are formed and re-formed by the movement of the dancers, a powerful, well-aimed fan and by scoops wielded by the dancers. Each change in its contours allows the material to become something else in the eyes and imagination of the audience: the Czech winter landscape is the most obvious and immediately physical; others are far more rarefied and inspired.
Flanked by two irregular, swooping, oversize flats that transform Bay 20 at Carriageworks into a dark, funnel-shaped space, the dancers and their white material are almost spilled into the laps of the audience. It also means that when parts of the action take place outside the enclosed area – such as when the statuesque Sarah Jayne Howard morphs into American long-jumper Bob Beamon – and literally climbs the walls in her efforts to train for Olympic gold, the alienation he experienced is tangible. The same goes for the woman who begins to relate the horror story of living with a husband who’s been in a coma for more than a decade. It happens behind the jail-like bars of light thrown by louvred hospital windows; his movements – another astonishing pas de deux – as the comatose, barely living man are at once frightening and graceful and when he tells of coming back to life and its aftermath, the feeling turns to shock.
Possibly the most effective use of the dense white setting is in the way it suggests the suffocating subterranean world where miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb (Crowley and Joshua Tyler) were trapped. The two disappear into it and the audience is left to contemplate invisibility, the unknown, the white blindness of total dark – and other sensations the two endured for so long with their jokes, songs, and inconceivable fears and will to live. The awful serendipity of this particular story choice – post the Chilean happy ending and during the tragedy of Greymouth – made it particularly poignant on the night.
The collaborators of Force Majeure, with Max Lyandvert’s music and soundscape, have created a bold, beautiful, thought-provoking work that defies the boundaries of dance, theatre and the barriers between. It might not suit those who like their dancers to dance in conventional ways; it might be a bit obtuse for those who like their theatre with a beginning, a middle and an end. But, if you enjoy the experience of skyrocketing imagination and flair, the courage of convictions and ingenuity beyond the bounds of the everyday, there’s every chance you’ll come out Not In A Million Years on a high of exhilaration and uncommon joy.
