Sydney Festival 08 - Into
About an Hour - Into at Parramatta Riverside Jan 8-12 and The Studio, Sydney Opera House, Jan 15-20; www.sydneyfestival.org.au
One of Fergus Linehan’s achievements, as artistic director of the Sydney Festival, is the establishment of the About An Hour events. Not only are they mostly short, sharp and sweet – as the umbrella title suggests – which suits a lot of people, but they also effectively counter the perennial problem of costs.
To be asked to spend just $25 on a live experience is an inestimable bargain; the response of thousands of Sydneysiders in snapping up the tickets suggests it's a much-appreciated bargain.
This year the main focus of About An Hour is contemporary dance in all its permutations. Works by Lucy Guerin, the late Tanja Liedke, Gideon Obarzanek, Kate Champion, Shaun Parker and Stephen Page make the program a virtual mini-contemporary dance festival.
Adding to a sense of the new, raw and unexpected is Into, two new works by Frances Rings and Narelle Benjamin, designed to be danced by Kathryn Dunn. The original intention – still to come to fruition – is that Dunn will also dance new works by Meryl Tankard and Kate Champion, as part of this program devoted to inspirational women.
Dunn is a dancer whose career to date has been stellar (Sydney Dance Company, Royal Ballet, Chunky Move, Bangarra) and who, in recent times, has combined contemporary dance discipline with moves into musical theatre and choreography. The result is a performer whose technique and physicality combine with an inner glow of intelligence and experience to make her one of the most distinctive presences in the Australian dance world.
The program begins with Rings' minimal but intense piece about birth and landscape: Belonging. It's a restless meditation on landscape and memory, memory of landscape, landscape as memory as well as the interior landscape, pre-birth, of which we apparently have little or no memory. It begins with a pale, disembodied limb feeling its way out of the darkness (egg? womb?) and continues into a brief, melancholic exploration of place and time and is at once beautiful, mysterious, elevating and sad. Rings continues her journey as a choreographer with another assured step.
The second element of Into is Narelle Benjamin’s ambitious work, Figment. Dunn shares the stage with a oversize mirror in an ornate frame. As well as her own reflection in the glass, there are occasional back projections into it, while the dancer is separated from the audience by a scrim on which is projected a series of abstract and other images. The soundscape incorporates household sounds, static, music and body noise - breathing, hearttbeat and so on - while the lighting seamlessly melds and either contrasts or complements these elements.
Figment’s other creative contributors, composer Huey Benjamin, video artist/designer Samuel James and lighting designer Glenn Hughes have helped Benjamin bring to fruition a strong and disturbing evocation of the world of the schizophrenic. Powerful and insightful dance theatre.
