As Things Go → Mar ‘24
Melbourne Dance Centre, March 2024
“The performance looks to be an environment in which the audience witnesses live decision making within the context of a framework developed by the choreographer, called The Lettuce, Book and the Lighting Desk.” - Jacqui Maida
Director: Jacqui Maida
Dancers: Jacqui Maida, Paris Robinson, Reuben Macdougall Di Manno
Costume Design and Programme Essay: Char Lee
Sound: Dion Spyropoulos
Lighting: Viv Hargreaves
Graphic Design: Matt Maida
The Magic of Chance: A Playground for Surprise Encounters
Dance, and theatre in general, I would argue is problematically over-rehearsed. I remember getting prepared for my childhood recitals, wracked with nerves. We had practised for half the year, and the most important thing was that we replicated the dance moves, lyrics, and cues we’d rehearsed to a T. For a medium that centres around liveness and transience, the goal of replicability risks being naïve and reductive. I’m reminded of a Belgian noise band called Tat2noisact. They performed while the lead singer got tattooed by another bandmate. The performance happened outside, which added the variable of weather – a storm cloud brewed and conjured above the boat. The relinquishing of control, both weather and their tattooed bodies, is key to highlighting the slippery tangibility of performance. Those passing by and lingering created the happening, alongside the band, the ship, and the storm clouds.
What I’m trying to illustrate, is that performance is a contextually rich and complicated medium. It navigates bodies, atmospheres, temporalities, sites, and audiences. It is daunting to consider all these variables, but the reward is rich and can be a useful tool for expanding our engagement with the world. As a designer, I’ve found that costumes are often designed in a vacuum, where a dangerous neutrality about the performer's body is assumed. The development stops short at the final concept drawing. This product-focused approach to performance-making negates the connecting possibilities within the rehearsal room. We create performances to transmute energy, ideas, and stories, so why doesn’t that extend to the development of work?
Jacqui Maida has been working on their framework for improvisation over the past three years; I’m still just cracking the surface I feel, but I would describe it as a loose container to work within – or perhaps a salad bowl. In my experience, it has acted as a soft technology to understand modes of thinking and feelings through movement. The Lighting Desk component is of particular interest to me. By manipulating the conditions for improvisation using texture, sound, lighting, and costume we can start to build worlds and atmospheres.
In As Things Go, there are a series of overlapping containers in play. One of many that we can sit within is costume. Building a frame for improvisation opens a playground for surprise encounters and the magic of chance. As performers within an improvised work, a massive amount of freedom and autonomy is granted. What we choose to put in the container creates an atmosphere in which a score emerges from a breeding ground of chance encounters, haptic responsiveness, and sensory stimuli. Atmospheres have the potential to accent, orient and draw attention to feelings of world in and outside of the theatre.
When the contents of the container have agency, there emerges a symbiotic relationship between stimuli and performer. Especially in an improvised context, the outcome of the performance differs each time, which means the human bodies must relinquish some of their control to the material bodies. This letting go of control offers exciting outcomes when attempting to stage ephemeral performances. Witnesses get to explore worlds for the first time, alongside the performers. The transience of live performance is amplified, and the stakes are shared equally between the container, performer, and audience.
I consider this relinquishing of control important in the way in which we move through the world more generally. Offering attentiveness to our environments can provide insightful, alternative ways of existing and collaborating that aren’t ruled by destructive colonial structures. When we relinquish control and binary ideas of success, we start to notice our environment and community.
Head to any park and you’ll find worlds being made in their thousands by kids. The key to container-making is playmaking. I propose an urgent re-prioritising of learning, connection, wonder, and exploration - alternative modes of making create space for more diverse stories, identities, and bodies.
When we open ourselves to surprise encounters, we start to realise what wasn’t visible before, and what’s been missing all along.