Theatre Notes 22 July 2009
Reviewed by Alison Croggon
No doubt it was just as well it was a few days before I saw Disagreeable Object at Chunky Move. One needs a palate cleansing after an experience like Miracle: and Michelle Heaven's work, remounted and reworked after a premiere season at Arts House, is almost at the polar opposite of the possibilities of dance.
This 30-minute work takes place in a purpose-built theatre inside the Chunky Move Studio, an enclosed space smelling of freshly-sawn wood in which the audience sits intimately together on a rake of stairs below a low ceiling. I knew it reminded me of something when I sat down, something to do with childhood, but it took a while to trace the resonance: it was like sitting inside the cubby houses I used to make out of scrap bits of wood, with the same sense of delighted secrecy.
And there's that childhood resonance in the dance itself, with a good dash of subterranean Freudian macabre, where the nonsensical is a prompt for the darker realities of the psyche. Childhood is not, after all, the sunny place of innocence that some people claim: it's cruel, primitive, full of shadows and inchoate fears. This dance takes place, as Heaven says, "downstairs", in the mysterious reaches of the subconscious, where childhood still lives in all of us.
It's like a strange fairytale, the Brothers Grimm filtered through Edward Gorey, perhaps, with a dash of German Expressionism and the Addams Family: comic, dreamlike, fantastic and unsettlingly sinister. And, like a proper children's story, it's deeply concerned with eating: in this case, peas. The program note, which describes it as a "tall short tale", will probably suffice as a plot: "she eats..... blackout. peas. he craves..... peas."
The "tall, short" tale extends to the dancers: the choreography exploits the enormous height difference between Heaven and her co-dancer, Brian Lucas, to its full comic effect. The production plays with the perspectives of the enclosed stage areas (there are three, each framed behind the other in a receding hallway of space) in ways that make Lucas, who is already tall, seem to be a giant, or the diminutive Heaven gain a good two feet. Lucas, with shaved head and full dress tails, is the sinister silhouette on the stairs at the back of the mind, or the childish man being spoon-fed - or in this case, fork-fed - by an impatient and murderous maid (Heaven), who has poisoned the peas in a Mad Scientist scene which does wonderful things with dry ice.
The dance emerges and retreats from total blackness with some astounding and gorgeously subtle lighting effects by Ben Cobham of Bluebottle, which intensifies its dreamlike qualities. Bill McDonald's sound design, with its scratchy recordings of silent film music or the jarring repetition of a needle bumping a vinyl on a record player, builds its strange claustrophobia, as if we are underground and half-hearing remnants from a past we don't quite understand.
As in a dream, you are not quite sure what is happening; as in a dream, it is limned with significance, possibly a dreadful one. The neurotic precision of Heaven's stylised choreography - as when she turns on a tap with hands that wrap around it like neurasthenic spiders, her bum stuck up in a beautiful curve that shows off her absurd bustle, or her rabbit-like chewing of pea-pods - focuses on the tiniest details in a way that distorts everything around them. It's a kind of force-field of sinister absurdity. A wholly enchanting, exquisite work, perhaps especially for people who like cubby houses and Edward Gorey.