Chunky Move

Most dancers expect to develop the odd blister during rehearsals, but few anticipate being knocked out cold by a violent blow to the head. Fewer still would expect said assault to come from the heel of a fellow dancer. But then not many dance companies spend their rehearsals rolling down a hill “like Jack and Jill” to get used to working on a steep gradient. Such are the risks involved in dancing for Chunky Move, whose Melbourne-based founder Gideon Obanzanek was adamant to have his latest project performed on an incline.

“I was kicked smack-bang right in the back of my skull,” remembers Kristy Ayre, one of the six Chunky Move dancers behind the hotly-anticipated EIF fixture Mortal Engine, “and I heard little jerry birds tweeting for a few moments. So there have been a few painful incidents as a result of the raked stage.”

Ayre’s accident was just the tip of the iceberg; even the basics of learning to move around on the surface without falling over were a nightmare. “A gradient of fifteen degrees doesn't sound ultra huge but when you're standing in front of it and you're used to performing on the flat, it's kind of scary," says Ayre. "It's like dancing on the roof of a house.”

When the incline was finally deemed intolerable, Obanzanek was forced to rethink much of the production’s choreography, and it was at about this time that the stage gained an ominous, abrasive surface designed to stop the dancers from slipping. This it did to a large extent, but only at the expense of their skin.

“They all dance in bare feet and there's a lot of floor work done against the surface, so it's been pretty tough on their skin,” admits Obanzanek, whose decision to stick with the stage might seem strange or even cruel to those unacquainted with the nature of the show. But the slope doubles up as a canvas for a stream of projected images, and is an absolutely essential element to the show.

Mortal Engine uses advanced technology to synchronise light and sound effects with the dancers' movements, generating a so-called “total sensory assault.” From the audience’s perspective their moving bodies become one with the fluid patterns that permanently surround them, as if they dissolve into the space they occupy and give it life.

“What I wanted to show is that we actually have an effect on our surroundings and that they have an effect on us. We’re inextricably part of and connected to the world around us, and I see Mortal Engine as a visualisation of that relationship,” says Obanzanek, who worked with computer engineer Frieder Weiss to integrate contemporary dance, electronic music and moving images.

A series of infrared video cameras positioned around the stage film the action, calculate the precise positioning of the dancers' bodies and feed the information to five computers that generate a sequence of images. These images are then projected back onto the performers, immersing them in a patterned light born of their own movements. It’s an almost overwhelming, multi-sensory spectacle when seen from the audience, but an incredibly trying exercise for the performers, and once they’d finally come to terms with the slope, they faced an even more monstrous challenge in the disorientating visuals.

“It was weeks before our performers felt comfortable working in these conditions,” says Obanzanek. “They found it very difficult to find the ground, as the floor is artificially shifting and the depth of the field is constantly changing in relation to the image.”

For many of the dancers, it was the lack of light that made executing certain movements almost impossible. “Some of the effects we have in this show are really, really dark and we’re lit by a band or circle of light that only hits the extremities of our bodies,” says Ayre, “so the environment is quite scary, especially when combined with the ramp.”

But it's not all blisters, bruises and bumps to the head. One of the benefits of Weiss's systems is that they give the dancers total freedom of expression on stage, as the lighting and music respond only to their movements. And as a consequence, the show is different every time it’s performed.

“It's wonderful not to be constricted to dancing exactly the same every time,” says Ayre, “to not have to follow a precise choreographic pathway. You can really concentrate on what you're doing with your partner because you control the sound and light. It gives you a great feeling of power.”

The technology that drives Mortal Engine is an extension of that used by Obanzanek in Glow, a solo performance that Chunky Move toured with internationally in 2006, in which the movements of a single dancer similarly cued patterns of light and sounds.

“After Glow, we wanted to use a set of far more complex graphics called semi-autonomous bodies,” says Obanzanek. “These relate to the body, and you can see that, but they actually take on a life of their own, and the effect it creates is quite unusual.”

With no professional training in computer technology, Obanzanek has to rely on a team of four technicians to work the various systems controlling the lasers and sound components. Doesn't that make him nervous?

“It’s very nerve-wracking to be completely reliant on a series of computer systems I don't know how to operate,” he says. “I think I'm more nervous than anybody else before a show simply because there’d be nothing I could do about it if there was a technical hitch. The technicians seem much calmer than me... though when things do go wrong they seem to just sit there and scratch their heads.”