Arco Renz review: Good vibrations meld Javanese tradition with modern style in solid.states
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Arco Renz review: Good vibrations meld Javanese tradition with modern style in solid.states Read later
November 24, 2015 Jordan Beth Vincent
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Melanie Lane takes the spotlight in solid.states. Photo: Jean-Luc Tanghe
SOLID.STATES ARCO RENZ Dancehouse Until 21 November As the lights slowly rise, dancer Eko Supriyanto incrementally lowers his arms from above his head with a sense of a deliberate revealing. Supriyanto, who is an accomplished Javanese court dancer, stands on a large platform. His first wobbles seem like brief moments of unsteadiness, but it soon becomes apparent that the platform is vibrating. This is a metaphor for the stability that is valued in Javanese culture, as well as, perhaps, the many external elements that challenge it. Jans Maertens' lighting design highlights Supriyanto's shape in silhouette, but also throws into relief the quivering of his muscles as he fights for control of his own physicality. For the second half of solid.states, contemporary dancer Melanie Lane leaps onto the platform. Unlike Supriyanto, whose movement seems to focus on the smallest details of a flexed wrist or raised heel, Lane brings an attacking energy. She, too, draws upon her Javanese heritage, moving from a base position of a deep lunge, but she adopts movement that is increasingly distant from Supriyanto's formality. Lane eventually succumbs to the challenge of dancing on a moving floor by lying down and gripping the platform's edge. The shaking of the platform becomes transposed to human flesh, almost as though there is a rhythmic link between these two very different forms. Lawrence Malstaf's vibrating stage platform is more than just a prop in solid.states. It squeaks with the effort of its vibrations, pounds the floor as the shaking grows more violent, or bounces into a new location. This is a third performer, with its own trajectory of rhythm and movement, and it serves to highlight the juxtaposition between fragility and solidity.
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Canberra's James Batchelor among 2016 Keir Choreographic Award finalists
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Canberra's James Batchelor among 2016 Keir Choreographic Award finalists Read later
November 26, 2015
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Performers James Batchelor and Sarah Aiken with philanthropist Phillip Keir, founder of the Keir Choreographic Award. Photo: Paul Jeffers
Canberra-born choreographer and performer James Batchelor is one of eight artists competing for the 2016 Keir Choreographic Award. It is the second edition of Australia's first major choreographic award, launched in 2014. The finalists had to submit a five-minute video with a 20-minute choreographic idea before being selected by an independent jury to each create a new work.
James Batchelor in his work METASYSTEMS. Photo: Anna Tweeddale
The eight commissioned works will feature in a premiere season at Melbourne's Dancehouse in late April.
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Canberra's James Batchelor among 2016 Keir Choreographic Award finalists
17/12/2015, 12:26 PM
Four of the works will then be selected to participate in the Sydney season presented by Carriageworks in May 2016. The winner will receive $30,000 , while the $10,000 audience choice prize will be decided by Sydney audiences. The biennial award is dedicated to commissioning choreographic work and to promoting innovative, experimental and cross-artform practice in contemporary dance. The other finalists are Sarah Aiken, Chloe Chignell, Ghenoa Gela, Martin Hansen, Alice Heyward, Rebecca Jensen, and Paea Leach. Batchelor, who is now based in Melbourne, has a performance practice in dance and visual arts. His projects take in urban environments and also some of the most remote places in the world. His work, METASYSTEMS, which was commissioned for the inaugural Keir Choreographic Award, has been presented in Canberra, Melbourne and Bangkok. It is touring in France, Italy and China.
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Choreographer Arco Renz melds Javanese traditions with modern twist
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Choreographer Arco Renz melds Javanese traditions with modern twist Read later
November 9, 2015 John Bailey
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Arco Renz is presenting his latest work at Dancehouse. Photo: Supplied
With a pedigree that includes periods assisting both Robert Wilson and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Arco Renz is a considerable figure in the world of performance today. The Belgian choreographer is known for works that foster exchange between European and Asian artists, and an upcoming offering at Dancehouse draws on traditions of Australia's closest neighbour to the north. solid.states will be performed by Eko Supriyanto, a leading dancer and choreographer in Indonesia who began training in Javanese court dancing at the age of seven, and Melanie Lane, whose mother is Javanese and who recently relocated to Melbourne from Berlin. Renz has set the performance on an unstable moving platform, and the precarious set will physicalise the work's exploration of "freedom and identity in the context of Javanese tradition". The performance will take place on November 20 and 21. dancehouse.com.au
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Controversial French choreographer Xavier Le Roy comes to Dancehouse
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Controversial French choreographer Xavier Le Roy comes to Dancehouse Read later
November 23, 2015 John Bailey
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Xavier Le Roy trained as a molecular biologist before turning to dance. Photo: Supplied
Dancehouse has a fine reputation for attracting enviable international guests in recent years and next up is French choreographer Xavier Le Roy, a considerable (if divisive) figure in the dance world. His work has been described as conceptual – last week in Sydney he presented audiences with 12 naked dancers prowling like lions – and has helped pioneer the French-led revolution in the possibilities of dance also pushed by the likes of Jerome Bel. Le Roy's Dancehouse residency promises treats for old fans and newcomers alike, including performances of his seminal 1998 work, SelfUnfinished, an In Conversation at the venue, a panel session at MPavilion and a two-week lab for local artists. dancehouse.com.au
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Keir Choreographic Award shortlist revealed
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Keir Choreographic Award shortlist revealed Read later
November 30, 2015 John Bailey
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Sarah Aiken, one of the eight contenders for the Keir Choreographic Award. Photo: Mark Metcalfe
Last year the Keir Choreographic Award was established to encourage and promote choreographers and dancers at the bleeding edge, and the winner's cash prize of $30,000 makes it one of the most attractive laurels in the Australian performing arts scene today. Inaugural winner Atlanta Eke is about to debut a new work at Chunky Move, and the finalists for the second incarnation of the award have just been announced. The eight competing are Sarah Aiken, James Batchelor, Chloe Chignell!, Ghenoa Gela!, Martin Hansen, Alice Heyward, Rebecca Jensen and Paea Leach, and the list alone is a potent reminder of both the diversity and strength of the country's independent dance sector right now. Each finalist will now produce a new 20-minute work to be shown at a semi-finals at Dancehouse in April, with four going on to finals at Sydney's Carriageworks in May 2016.
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Rising stars dance in the festive season with Lucy Guerin
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Rising stars dance in the festive season with Lucy Guerin Read later
December 14, 2015 John Bailey
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It's an atypically lively year's end for dance in Melbourne, with both local and international offerings in the city. Xavier Le Roy and Atlanta Eke have wrapped up seasons at Dancehouse and Chunky Move, respectively, while Lucy Guerin Inc's Pieces for Small Spaces takes place this week. The event has become an annual tradition, giving the floor to some of the country's most exciting new choreographers. This year's line-up includes James Batchelor, Tessa Broadby, Amber McCartney, Emily Robinson and Carly Sheppard. Their five short works will all play Wednesday to Sunday this week at Guerin's studio in West Melbourne, and Friday's session will include a post-show Q&A facilitated by choreographer Melanie Lane.
James Batchelor is among the new choreographers with work on show. Photo: Supplied
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Self-Unfinished review: Xavier Le Roy delivers masterpiece of transformation
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Self-Unfinished review: Xavier Le Roy delivers masterpiece of transformation Read later
December 6, 2015 Jordan Beth Vincent
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DANCE SELF-UNFINISHED Xavier le Roy Dancehouse !Until 5 December As we enter his space, French performer Xavier Le Roy is seated, waiting. His gaze, as he watches people file in, is inscrutable; his posture relaxed. In a moment, his focus intensifies and his long hands rest on the table before him. This position is one of several that Le Roy repeats throughout his solo, circling back to it as though something about that posture has a gravitational pull on him, or a meaning that he wants us to contemplate. Self-Unfinished, which premiered in 1998, is a masterpiece of its era, demonstrating an aesthetic of contemporary movement performance in which hyper-physicality is dismissed in favour of deliberation, simplicity, stillness, and silence. Self-Unfinished is surprisingly delicate in the way Le Roy feeds our imagination without prescribing a desired response. There is levity, too.
French choreographer Xavier Le Roy stuns in SelfUnfinished. Photo: Supplied
In Le Roy's performance, we see a small child at play, and an old man alone. We see the passage of time in a slow, deconstructed backwards walk, and grief as someone anonymous lies against the back wall, with one foot tucked in as though this smallest of detail matters. We see a man transform into something not quite human with four legs and no head, and with only a slice of human flesh to separate one hindquarter from its other half. These half-formed interpretations are individual, and the work is open enough to allow a multitude of responses to the different physical contortions that are known and unknown in the manner, perhaps, of a Rorschach test. Le Roy carries the scars from the specific and unusual demands of his performance, particularly from hundreds of performances spent furled over on his shoulders, or crouched at his little table. However, there is a reason this work has survived and continues to be toured, so many decades after its making. It is special.
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solid.states by Arco Renz
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% Dancehouse, Melbourne November 20-21 All of us, at both a personal and a cultural level, struggle with notions of stability. Indeed, our ongoing desire to achieve a modicum of certainty in an inherently fluid universe places us continually at odds with the core facts of our existence; namely, that it is ephemeral and fragile. The delusion of “solid states” is our collective, central fiction.
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In his finely honed, staccato work solid.states, Belgian choreographer Arco Renz not only blends Javanese tradition and European dance grammar but presents a digital – as opposed to analogue – vision. This is dance as a series of discreet positions revealed in a sequence rather than an organic flow, unfolding like frames per second, with all the attendant disconnection and other worldly feel of screen flicker. With calligraphic precision dancers, Eko Supriyanto and Melanie Lane respond to the constantly changing world, their gestures “animated”, a stop/start, move/pose progression that veers from Asian classicism to ballet grace and from martial arts stance to mime frieze. The effect is hypnotic and cold. This work seems to deliberately disengage our emotions. Its discontinuity reminds us in every moment that we are watching a fiction. An act. In this, we are perhaps asked to ponder the digital modernity we currently find ourselves in. Here is an attention-seeking world of movement and spectacle – vibrant, colourful, even beautiful – and yet profoundly unreal. In solid.states, it all seems to be happening to someone else — at a remove. In the end, the desperate search for solidity yields only isolated fragments – a pixelated relief from the oceanic nothingness beneath and beyond. For all the visceral clarity of dance and the immediacy of live bodies pulsing and sweating just metres away, Renz manages to maintain an eerie and effective distance, an abstraction that calls to mind the painterly constructions of European art and the shamanic aloofness of Javanese ceremonial dance. Part Eraserhead, part Metropolis, part Philip Glass, this jump cut, trance-like journey from fundamental uncertainty and back again is both unnerving and academic. It is as though the fact that we are prevented from truly caring, from genuinely connecting, not only gives us a get out clause but maroons us in permanent impermanence.
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French choreographer Xavier Le Roy's masterpiece Self Unfinished an ongoing body of work Date December 7, 2015
Philippa Hawker Film and arts writer
French choreographer and dancer Xavier Le Roy is in Melbourne for two weeks performing and taking workshops. Pictured at Dancehouse, Melbourne. Photo: Chris Hopkins When French choreographer and dancer Xavier Le Roy made a solo work in 1998, he thought it would have a brief life in two venues and never imagined it would become not only his signature piece, but also a kind of creative passport. The engrossing, disconcerting Self Unfinished â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which involves a performing body, a table, a chair, a wall, and a boom box in the corner â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is widely considered to be a contemporary masterpiece, and the continuing demand for it allows him to do other work. Its impetus was a series of questions about "what a body can do, and what I can do. How does it look, and how is someone's perception of it constructed?" Those questions remain important for him, he says, "but I do other things to continue asking them, with other people, in other frames and contexts".
He never thought it would be a sought-after piece, he says. "In fact quite the opposite. It requires quite some concentration from the public, which is not a given. A 50-minute work that takes place in silence, with a single person, moving slowly â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these characteristics of the work are not characteristics that make something popular."
Xavier Le Roy in Self Unfinished. Photo: Katrin Schoof Le Roy, one of contemporary dance's most challenging choreographers and performers, divides his time between commissions and self-generated projects, a balancing act that he describes as "a constant negotiation with oneself. I am lucky to have the possibility to have commissions, and lucky that I am not depending entirely on them, so I can say no." His practice also keeps him on the move. "I'm not really based anywhere," he says. "The longest time I have been in a place this year is Beirut, but you cannot say I'm from there." At the moment he is in Australia, in a range of roles: in residence at Dancehouse, taking workshops, participating in discussions, performing and creating: he has presented Self Unfinished, and Temporary Title, a new commissioned piece with a group of dancers, was performed last week at Sydney's Carriageworks, as part of the Kaldor Public Art Projects. Exhibitions and screenings at ACMI and Alliance Francaise also give insights into his work. That kind of multi-tasking, he says, is what artists do these days, but it's not unique to them. "Maybe it's a lot at the same time, but it's also the condition of working in our society. There is more activity, and you have to do more." Commissions can come with the expectation that he will do something familiar, will reproduce what he has done before. "Maybe with every proposal there is a moment where you compromise," something he's prepared to do, he says, "because it's very rigid to say 'I don't compromise'. But I want to try to do it as late as possible." Yet they can also provide a direction or a challenge. "I take them as an instruction, a possibility to make something I would not think of otherwise." Le Roy came indirectly to choreography and dance, via science; he has a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier. The questions that have preoccupied him from his earliest days remain, he says, but they shift and take different forms. One that has receded is "a question about my ability, thinking that I am not able to dance" â&#x20AC;&#x201C; his continuing work, he says, has provided some kind of answer to it.
He has become more explicitly interested in the question of the viewer's perception. "A live work is live with these people present," he says, gesturing towards imaginary spectators. "It's not that you want to control it, it's about curiosity. What does the work do to the public, what does the public do to the work?" A recent phenomenon, when it comes to contemporary audiences, is that some spectators want to record as well as watch; they use their devices to take pictures or film what they're experiencing. Le Roy responds in different ways to this. "If I notice it," he says, "for example when I do Self Unfinished, I would stop and tell people not to. In Temporary Title, we say at the entrance, please don't take pictures. If the performer becomes aware of it and feels uncomfortable, the rule is that you can stop what you do and ask them. "It doesn't bother me systematically. It's part of our culture, so people do it, but there is doing it and doing it, and there are some thresholds when it can be uncomfortable. And as a performer, if you feel that, then I think you should say so, because the work is not made for this way of receiving it." Yet there are no hard and fast rules, he adds. "There may be performances when you can invite it." Xavier Le Roy will appear at MPavilion on December 11 and December 12. mpavilion.org The exhibition Contemporary Dance in Question is at the Alliance Francaise, St Kilda until December 12. afmelbourne.com.au French Conceptual Dance On Screen, a 75-minute compilation that includes an extract from Self Unfinished, screens at ACMI from 11am to 4pm on December 12. acmi.net.au
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/dance/french-choreographer-xavier-le-roysmasterpiece-self-unfinished-an-ongoing-body-of-work-20151207-glhbth.html#ixzz3uchETM3I Follow us: @theage on Twitter | theageAustralia on Facebook
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