Manifesto: when high-concept contemporary dance meets cheerleading

This wrap of Rising Festival reviews kicks off with two dance works, Stephanie Lake’s Manifesto and community dance work Multitud, and includes an eight-hour ‘durational work’, a look at Baxter Dury, online youth culture, singer Tkay Maidza, a searing Indigenous dance work, Dutch choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s explicit new creation, a solo show at Malthouse, Chunky Moves’ co-production with Restless Dance Theatre, and Zambian powerhouse Sampa the Great.

DANCE

Manifesto ★★★★

Malthouse Theatre, until 12 June

What is demanded by this dancing manifesto created by Melbourne-based choreographer Stephanie Lake? Fun, togetherness and the energy of a stadium rock concert. It’s a call for more flash, more sizzle and more connection. And it’s thumping good fun.

This is what happens when high-concept European-style contemporary dance meets cheerleading. Manifesto, with an ensemble of nine drummers and nine dancers, is a spectacle of relentless uplift, full of whoops, shouts and big smiles. All that’s missing is a pyramid.

There is plenty of ostentation. The work is studded with high kicks, springy leaps, somersaults, cartwheels, aerial contortions, gymnastic lifts and exhibitions of breakdance floor moves. It’s all very rough-edged – very rock-and-roll – but also very dramatic.

The drummers are behind and above the dancers on a bandstand draped in red curtains. The design – set by Charles Davis and lighting by Bosco Shaw – looks like a television set for a big band in which every instrument is an identical rock drum kit.

The score – by Robin Fox – is built on simple rock beats, varied with rapid fills and bits of razzle and flare. The drummers, indeed, are part of the dance because they each have a unique style and kinaesthetic attraction.

The dancers – a fine troupe led by Samantha Hines and Harrison Ritchie-Jones – are buoyant throughout. As the show goes on, they open themselves more completely to the audience and to each other: the costumes get skimpier and the vibe gets looser.

There is nothing ruminative or shaded about this work. Its meaning, as with all manifestos, is on the surface. Everything is outward and earnest. There is no secret thought or doubt hiding between the steps. It isn’t subtle, but it is effective.

It’s not unusual to see a dancer paired with a drummer. Multiplying that combination nine times is a grandiose gesture, fascinating in its absurdity and its supercharged frivolity. Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

DANCE

Multitud ★★★½
Melbourne Town Hall, June 11

It’s an unwritten rule that every arts festival programme must feature at least one large-scale participatory dance event. This has been true in Melbourne since at least 2003 when the festival opened with thousands of Gene Kelly enthusiasts performing the dance from Singin’ in the Rain at Federation Square.

This year we got Multidud, created by Uruguayan choreographer Tamara Cubas, a choreographed piece featuring no fewer than 70 local performers of different ages and backgrounds. But while it ticks the box for community engagement it is a far more abstract and enigmatic event than Singing in the Rain.

Multitud has bounced around global festival circuit for more than ten years. The look and structure have remained more-or-less the same, but the feeling changes from performance to performance because the volunteer participants in each city – mostly amateurs – approach the material differently.

Here in Melbourne the work has an unsettling effect. The relationship between the individual and the crowd, as the performers figure out how to flow and interact with each other in the dimly lit space, appears somehow dystopian. There is the sense not of willing cooperation but zombie-like possession.

For more than an hour and a half, the dancers – mostly but not exclusively women – walk and jog, collapse and writhe as the collective evolves. They stare intently at one another. They shout in unison. They laugh in unison. They strip each another. And they fall into a great pile together.

One or two participants slip back into the audience, as if walking out on the commune.

Perhaps it literally depends on where you stand. At the end, the performers line up at one end of the hall. Seen from behind, the row of silhouettes suggests the erasure of personality. If seen from the other side, however, the effect might have been quite different. Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE

8/8/8 Work ★★½
Schoolhouse Studios Coburg, June 4

Inspired by the utopian division of our days into eight hours of work, eight hours rest and eight of play, 8/8/8 Work is the first instalment in a 24-hour durational performance from Harriet Gillies and Marcus McKenzie. And if attending a show of that length sounds like work to you, you’re not alone.

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Durational performance fills a peculiar theatrical niche, and its most renowned practitioners – the avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson, for instance, who created the 5 ½ hour Einstein on the Beach and whose longest work stretched over seven days on an Iranian mountaintop – have a flexible philosophy when it comes to experiencing such epics.

Wilson once said he wanted his theatre to exist the way the weather exists. The implacability of its presence, its simply being there, irrespective of observation, overrode any conventional approach to audience. The idea of passive spectators being compelled to witness the whole event was anathema to him.

To be fair, passivity isn’t on the menu at 8/8/8 Work, but a “no passouts” policy and a requirement to stay for the duration – rather than being allowed to come and go as you please, as Wilson encourages audiences to do – does make the project more arduous to endure than it should be.

Good durational performance does rewire your sense of time and expand the attention span, but it doesn’t typically need to resort to “boredom resistance training” to achieve that goal. And perhaps the artists wouldn’t have had to address the experience of time in such a blatant way if the piece didn’t lead with its chin.

Audiences stand in a massive queue and must complete a (ridiculously frustrating) online form for half an hour before the real action starts. We’re required to “get” the joke on us – then to sit through a potted lecture on time and ennui! If the waste of time doesn’t annoy you, the heavy-handed imposition of meaning probably will.

It’s as if the artists understand the task at hand intellectually, but falter with creative strategies to get there. And yet the piece does generate beguiling momentum when it shifts to resemble a more traditional performance installation.

The finest sequences include hours of iterative performance in the round focused on the routines of office workers. It’s almost a minimalist version of The Office, as low-temperature satire builds and breaks through waves of repetition.

Each station of the 9-to-5 cross is visited and revisited – water-cooler chat, office gossip, microaggressions and other glancing encounters with co-workers – with slight deviations that become ever more elaborate (and funnier) as attempts to stave off drudgery get desperate.

Existential comedy eventually erupts into anarchic rebellion. There’s wild karaoke at the prospect of working from home, just as management descends with dunderheaded plans to promote “equality and diversity” by selling rainbow focaccias in the cafeteria.

Less compelling are undergraduate scenes involving anti-capitalist pageantry – I never want to see Colonel Sanders engaged in sex acts with Big Pharma again – or encounters with de-Centrelink workers.

They feel like padding – the one thing you can’t get away with in durational performance – and are about as appealing as unpaid overtime, especially given how successful the core performers are at drenching us in the absurdities of contemporary workplace culture. Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC

Baxter Dury ★★½

The Forum, June 7

Baxter Dury doesn’t give a monkey’s. Ambling about in his white suit, neck chain and singlet, game face on, he cultivates the insouciant air of a bit player from Minder off to see a man about a dog. He may know more than he lets on. He may not. He lets on very little.

The West London flaneur’s sweary speaking parts sketch terse plotlines for cold Euro-disco grooves, melodies sustained by the synth and double-tracked vocals of Madeleine Hart. A drummer from Byron slaps metronomic beats. A guitarist from Adelaide adds clanging accents. You could call it minimal. That might be saying too much.

The son of Ian Dury — partly why the Forum is sold out on a Tuesday night, surely — plays a series of characters perhaps not very far removed from the son of Ian Dury. His spare, chafing, oblique monologues conjure wee-hours confrontations in clubs and taxi ranks and blunt morning-after phone calls.

“I’m not your f---ing friend,” is the opening shot of Night Chancers. “Oi, d’you remember me? Broke my nose once,” he jeers in Oi. The guy in Miami is less likeable: “I’m the turgid f---ed up lil’ goat pissing on your f---ing hill,” he barks.

Hart plays the vapid sing-song foil. “Ce n’est pas ma probleme, Je ne suis pas ton chien,” she deadpans, or “Everybody loves to say goodbye,” or “I don’t give a shit about ya.”

It’s only a lark, Dury’s stubbie-swinging karate-chop stage manoeuvres remind us at intervals. When he wants to rile us up, he drops his jacket to show bare shoulders. We respond with cheers. The beats make us nod and smile. The rest makes us shrug and laugh. He does his hit Cocaine Man in the encore. “Ta-ra Melbourne,” he says.

“Baxter loves you,” Hart sings. Phew. We weren’t sure he cared. Reviewed by Michael Dwyer

THEATRE

Anything & Everything ★★★
ACMI, until June 12

In Anything & Everything, an ensemble aged between 11 and 21 responds to a pressing concern – the effect of growing up in an age saturated by screen culture and social media.

The internet may be a scapegoat for all manner of ills, but the effect of social media use on adolescent mental health has received increasing attention, especially since last year’s leak from Facebook (now Meta) revealed internal research suggesting that Instagram could worsen body image problems and cause mental harm to teenage girls.

Anything & Everything steps into the fray, following six performers – Poppy Goodman, Zara Nawaz, Harriet McNicol, Eza Bakker-Graham, Saskia Ellis-Gardam, and Ebony Macpherson – as they curate themselves.

Almost every scene is live filmed by their peers, and there’s plenty of primping to do, not to mention filters to be applied, in pursuit of self-generated fantasy.

Cute drawings of dream houses jostle with fearless stories about coming out as nonbinary, and the sense of playful escape turns in on itself as the youngsters transform themselves into meme-worthy social media sensations.

Director Jackson Castiglione suffuses the piece with the rather adult idea that identity is experienced as performance.

True, the dialogue occupies a halfway house between naivety and knowingness that sometimes gives too much latitude to the former, but that’s also part of its charm. Something better shaped and guided would have seemed less authentic, and all the digital fakery of the online world puts a premium on being true to yourself, come what may.

Performance devised with children and adolescents is a fascinating area of artistic practice that has exercised theatre luminaries internationally.

This piece may be too loosely executed to stand among the very best – the rebellious Dutch theatre mavericks Ontroerend Goed, say (who gave a serious platform to youth on the international stage long before Greta Thunberg made her stand), or closer to home, the work of artists such as Adena Jacobs – but it is still striking and relevant theatre.

Anything & Everything gives voice to those who still tend to be seen and not heard, throwing unexpected relief on the world and where it is headed. Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC

Tkay Maidza ★★★★★
The Forum, June 5

Tkay Maidza was a shock to the senses, in all the right ways.

The curtains parted to reveal the singer, fresh off an international tour supporting pop royalty Billie Eilish, standing among floral bouquets. She wandered among the blooms, filling the room with bright energy, as the audience swayed, bounced and bopped.

Her show was split into three acts, each with its own outfit and theme. The first had a feminine spirit, with beautiful, soft vocals interspersed by punchy rap verses.

A live band added a new flavour and depth to her tracks: drummer Jack Robert delivered a drum solo in the transition to the second act that would make any musician drool. Then Tkay was back, dancing in a skin tight body suit.

There were slow sing-alongs and conversations with the crowd (in one aside, she noted “it’s scary to reflect on yourself and your flaws, but that’s how you grow”). Vulnerability in her music created a strong connection with her fans – but it was far from all soft and sweet.

Lastly came a darker, heavier section of the night where the singer’s voice entered rock, even metal territory. She launched onto the barrier, chanting lyrics with the crowd.

This was pristine musical showmanship: a genre-busting night that set a high bar for acts to come. Reviewed by Tori Briggs

DANCE

Jurrungu Ngan-ga [Straight Talk] ★★★½
Arts House, until 11 June

This latest production by Broome-based company Marrugeku opens with a compelling solo by Emmanuel James Brown, a routine full of muscular lunges, arms reaching forward and back with subtle turns of the wrist. He gives the impression of pulling the space around himself, authoring a place of refuge and protection.

Jurrungu Ngan-ga is a meditation on incarceration. It connects the over representation of First Peoples in the criminal justice system with our long-standing policy of locking up non-citizens who do not hold a valid visa. And it asserts that an obsession with containing the unknown continues to trouble the Australian psyche.

Created by Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain, this multi-media work features a large and diverse ensemble: a fierce crew with a passionate determination to call out injustice and promote change. It also features dramaturgical contributions from Pat Dodson, award-winning writer Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian.

The key motif, repeated throughout, is the struggle toward uninhibited self-expression. So, for example, we see the ensemble slogging across the stage, backs bent, dragging their feet. A long metal cage looms behind them. Eventually they throw off their metaphorical shackles, joining together then showcasing their individual dance styles.

There are also portrayals of the police, prison guards and inmates. There are scenes of humiliation and abuse. There is video surveillance and protest music. There are sinister props, such as a spit hood. And there is a shouted list of the names of people who died while in custody.

Jurrungu Ngan-ga only intermittently fulfils the spinetingling promise of the opening solo, but it has received an enthusiastic reception during its Melbourne premiere and earlier this year in Sydney. This is a testament to the urgency of its message about the manifest iniquity of our system of discipline and punishment – as well as the energy of the ensemble. Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

DANCE

21 Pornographies ★★★½
Meat Market, until 4 June

Dutch choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s solo performance tests the truth of that well known non-definition of pornography, proposed by Justice Potter Stewart at the height of the sexual revolution: “I know it when I see it”.

It presents a series of mostly verbal descriptions of situations that are not obviously pornographic but that nonetheless suggest an exploitative transaction, inviting us to think of pornography speculatively, as form rather than content.

Not that the show lacks obscenity. It begins with a detailed account of the scatological second chapter of Pasolini’s Salo, with its parade of humiliations and tortures instigated by four wealthy men of power.

But Ingvartsen contrasts this with other kinds of material. She describes commercials and war films and dream-like fantasies. There is even some audience interaction, done very gently, that encourages a more distanced, contemplative mood.

Ingvartsen is naked throughout. She has a robust physicality, projecting confidence rather than vulnerability. This works in tension with her material, making it harder to connect emotionally with the victims and perpetrators she represents.

Indeed, 21 Pornographies, with its bare stage and minimalist strip lighting, has a coolly anthropological tone. Even the danced interludes – where Ingvartsen performs peppy commercial routines – have a matter-of-fact quality.

When she urinates on the stage and smears it on her face nobody in the audience bats an eyelid because in that moment it seems like the obvious thing to do. It is, in fact, only the desultory illustration of something already described.

The achievement of this cerebral and multi-faceted work, which is more-or-less a monologue, is the way it connects images. The situations are different, some fictional and some drawn from life, but the pattern repeats.

Chocolate poured onto a naked body becomes bullets poured into a dying body becomes urine poured over a dead body. Pornography, it seems, is everywhere: a template for all kinds of extreme and not -so-extreme situations.

Do we really know what pornography is when we see it? Maybe, suggest Ingvartsen, the pornification of everything means something more insidious than the proliferation of titillating imagery. Maybe it means the transformation of thought itself. Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE

Maureen: Harbinger of Death ★★★½
Malthouse Theatre, until June 12

Based on a real-life figure, this solo show creates a gentle, eccentric style guide to death that unfolds into a love letter to King’s Cross in Sydney, and a cheeky up yours to living small.

Jonny Hawkins transforms into Maureen, a chain-smoking octogenarian and self-described “harbinger of death”. She has earned the title by not only outliving most of her friends, but also by correctly predicting the order (and sometimes the hour) of their demise.

Interwoven with the Greek myth of Persephone, given a rebellious retelling towards the end, the monologue slyly creeps towards the underworld by way of intimate fireside chat. This little old lady is a beguiling raconteur, and her warmth and wit fill the room as she remembers the lives of her friends.

Maureen especially enjoys relating the starring role she has sometimes played in smoothing their passage to the underworld. Not everyone needs her help: her larger-than-life friend Bunny died in the arms of Hugh Jackman during a Broadway show, and let’s face it, there are worse ways to go.

But she’s on hand with silk and champagne as her old flame Dennis succumbs to AIDS-related illness. And when her neighbour Tenille – whose cat she has inherited – dies in a way that might compromise her dignity, Maureen is a model of efficiency and discretion, quickly sprucing up the death scene and having a stern word to the cops.

These anecdotes resurrect shades of a King’s Cross demimonde – a world of misfits living freely under the radar – that Sydneysiders will immediately recognise. And yet you don’t need a cultural memory of the Cross yourself to appreciate the storytelling craft: the twigs in Maureen’s crazy nest are placed with such vividness and purpose they’ll stick in the imagination of outsiders, too.

True, there are a few slips in Hawkins’ little old lady act and the odd laugh line that doesn’t land, but nothing to break the spell of the piece.

Maureen: Harbinger of Death conjures a lost world with poignancy and irreverent charm. It’s a distilled tribute to the strength and stories of the elderly that shows how good theatre can be when all the creativity is concentrated into a single, memorable performance. Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE

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Rewards for the Tribe ★★★½
Chunky Move Studios, until June 5

Life’s a bit dizzying sometimes: full of frustrations and societal rules that don’t accommodate for everyone. And the past few years in particular have been filled with uncertainty and unpredictability.

This feeling of trying to fit into a world that’s unfamiliar, chaotic, even at times just a bit silly, is the focus of Chunky Move and Restless Dance Theatre’s world premiere of Rewards for the Tribe.

Having dancers with and without disability on stage was a refreshing sight: a microcosm of our society, showing the battles many face trying to fit in.

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The stage was scattered with geometric shapes and props, some resembling Tetris puzzle pieces, and a big plush cushion shaped like a comma. They referenced the Dutch artist Mondrian’s 20th-century abstract colour compositions, which sought to resolve the struggle between the individual and the universal by “abolishing natural form” in favour of pure geometry.

Microphones were embedded throughout. The dancers hummed and made guttural, animalistic noises into them, drawing contrast to the man-made objects that they purposefully ran into, giving life to the static pieces with noise and disturbance.

Dance is so often an art form where the labour is masked behind a shiny costume and a stoic face, but director and choreographer Antony Hamilton humanised the movements by allowing the dancers to grunt like tennis players in the first half of the show.

The dancers explored perpetual motion, resembling soldiers with hard-hitting, grounded and repetitive movements. A sequence of shattering and manic agitation transported the audience into a simulation accompanied by familiar sounds of video games and colourful lighting. Then, finally, some submission, as they became one with the objects, assuming proud poses reminiscent of neoclassical art such as Napoleon Crossing the Alps.

The performance was a celebration of differences, answering the question of what perfection can look like: different for everyone. Reviewed by Emma Sullivan

MUSIC

Sampa the Great ★★★★★
The Forum, June 1

On the first night of Melbourne’s winter, Sampa The Great broke down the doors at The Forum and brought what this city has missed so dearly - connection, celebration, and unbelievably good music.

The 28-year-old Zambian singer-songwriter and poet channelled the energy of the night with guttural and powerful warmth, treating the audience to an exhilarating exploration of her music alongside her 14-piece band – the first Zambian band, she proudly said, to perform at Coachella, the Sydney Opera House and now, The Forum.

The set list, a combination of the artist’s new, old and unreleased music, showed off Sampa’s skill and variation. The transitions between the genres that influences her – from hip-hop to soul to Zamrock (the Zambian genre which blends traditional African music with garage, acid, and psychedelic rock) were made seamless by her vocal butter, and visualised through deliriously powerful choreography, moody lighting and clever set design.

“As we make music for us, by us, please feel that love and bottle it up because it’s coming from our heart,” she said, in one of many sermon-like moments in between songs. She held the attention of the audience so strongly that a quietness simmered through the venue at these moments, before the music pulsed back and the crowd roared back up to dance.

Sampa’s sister and musician Mwanjè joined in to perform her song Wildones, and there was an encore appearance from support act KYE, who sang her electric single Gold with Sampa.

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The fiery joy that radiated off the stage in a celebration of power, self-assurance and vulnerability bulls-eyed what great music does: bringing people together.

“Music is a universal language,” Sampa The Great said. It may not be an original observation, but very few manage to speak it, and prove its truth, as powerfully as her. Reviewed by Carla Jaeger

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