INUK2
INUK2, Theatre Royal, Sydney, March 28-April 19 2008; ph: 1300 795 012 or www.ticketek.com, Canberra May 7-10, Melbourne May 28-31.
The Sydney Dance Company is in transition and Meryl Tankard’s place in that transition is immediately obvious. Asked to stage a work, at short notice, following the shocking and unexpected death of incoming artistic director Tanya Liedke in August last year, Tankard has sensibly returned to an existing piece and reworked it: 1997’s INUK. The result is transition in more ways than one.
Tankard, choreographer extraordinaire, has had to figure out, in double quick time, how to communicate with a company that essentially speaks another language; and the brio and conviction the SDC dancers bring to the stage in INUK2 suggest they are now fluent in Meryl. They’re clearly ready for the challenges that lie ahead in what will surely be a difficult year for them. (Two other guest choreographers, UK-based Rafael Bonachela and Canada’s Aszure Barton, and two more new works by Christmas.)
INUK2 could be summed up by a question and its answer: when the visiting Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a London journalist “What do you think of western civilisation?” the Mahatma replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” The two parts of INUK2 suggest that it still would be a good idea as some of the more alienating, uncomfortable and violent impulses of our society are played out in a rolling series of unconnected elements. They begin with an exquisite opening solo of what could be called Girl with Shadow (Annabel Knight with Regis Lansac video/Trudy Dalgliesh lighting) and continue into duets, trios, mixed pairs and full company.
Tankard and the dancers have explored the individual characters of the performers via her costumes – different for each – which bring a playful, sometimes contradictory set of visual clues to the stage. The work itself explores tribal, emotional and gender power plays set to music and soundscapes that range from Meredith Monk and Elena Kats Chernin to medleys of hoomei (Tuvan throat singing) recordings and tunes from the album Balkan Beat Box – sort of Middle Eastern/gypsy/electro-punk fusion. (The choice of music, ending with a sampled Kats Chernin percussion track overlaid on a live version of Nina Simone's “Ne me quitte pas”, would be worth a compilation CD in itself, by the way.)
Tankard’s long-time partner Regis Lansac’s visual and video wizardry features strongly in INUK2 and the effects and ideas have to be seen to be believed and even vaguely understood. Another long-time favourite of the choreographer is Sarah-Jayne Howard, an amazonian dancer who is close to a performance muse for Tankard. Howard is a guest artiste with SDC for this production and her presence is as powerful, magnetic, tender and eye-catching as ever.
The rest of the company of 14 dancers is a revelation in the way they have taken on Tankard’s idiosyncratic, athletic, hi-energy, rough-and-tumble (yet pin-point disciplined and accurate) style. The only thing she has not quite got through to them is that dancers are allowed to have voices and use them on stage. (Gasp.) But this takes time and time is a luxury Australian companies in general and this production in particular has to do without.
It’s unlikely that any of them got to see To Be Straight With You, Lloyd Newson and DV8’s extraordinary new work which graced the Adelaide Festival in March. If they had they would have seen dancers who spent as much time talking as dancing and much of that was dancing and talking simultaneously. Purists (who she?) grumped about the talking but most were blown away by Newson’s vision and originality (review in the StageNoise archive). Mind you, that originality and vision had something like two years gestation time: and it showed.
It’s scary to think what Tankard could achieve with the fine SDC dancers in – say – a year of experimentation. The sky would be the limit because an always exciting element of Meryl-speak is freedom: physical and creative freedom. It’s hard-won for dancers through discipline and application and, for the choreographer, it’s a matter of courage: to experiment, to collaborate and to risk failure as well as success. Tankard’s history demonstrates that she never closes her eyes to a new possibility and will jump into the abyss rather than tippy-toe endlessly in safe territory. Inevitably this approach works sometimes better than others but is never less than interesting and, more often than not, is thrilling. It’s also vital if forward momentum is to be maintained: in life, in dance and in choreography.
INUK2 isn’t entirely successful as a piece: there is some incoherence and the final “water” scene may be fun for the dancers but is awkward and too long, for instance. But it could be argued that coherence isn’t the point anyway, the free association of ideas and movement is paramount. If nothing else I suspect the production has loosened, if not severed, the dancers’ stylistic shackles to the past and that can only be good. As Gandhi also observed: “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”
