Mortal Engine

  

If I had to choose a single performance work that made the strongest and most enduring impression in 2009 it would be Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine. A brilliantly conceived and executed extended frisson of projected photonic energy, sound and dance that was premiered in Sydney in 2008 and had a very short season in Melbourne.

I’ve since been struck by how many friends and colleagues who had also seen the show tipped it as one of the very best things in recent memory. And many others were disappointed to have missed it. It is a work that etches itself into your mind and resurfaces unexpectedly for months afterwards.

So it was not surprising that opening night was packed for Mortal Engine’s return season in Melbourne - for a 10 day run. Since its premier Mortal Engine has garnered prizes and a large measure of critical acclaim. It has also now toured widely internationally. It’s a work that continues to grow in stature (not that it lacked confidence).

But after all the acclaim, prizes and intense international touring, is it still fresh? Put simply, cheers speak plainly and there were plenty at the end of the show.

So what makes this work so compelling? Before writing this piece I re-visited the review I wrote in 2009 and now feel even more strongly that Mortal Engine is an artistically important and probably historically noteworthy work, a defining moment in Australian dance, and in especially in cross-platform creative collaboration. Particularly at a time when visual art, performance art, digital cultures, and music seem ever more convergent, more collaborative and less distinguishable.

But what justifies such a claim?

The reason might be simple. Creative works combining different media are not uncommon and almost all tend towards overlay, synthesis or fusion (consider the disparate achievements of Marco Fusinato or Brody Ellis), even to a striving towards a form of evoked synaesthetic experience (where the formative elements are co-experienced, like a colour that is perceived as music through a merging of the senses).

The intrinsic ingenuity at the core of Mortal Engine produces a subtle but infinitely variable form where the audience’s artistic experience is literally an "emergent property" of the relational interplay between the work’s component energies.

The concept of an “emergent property” is an analogy borrowed from high physics: there is for example nothing in the nature of an individual H2O molecule that readily explains the wateriness of water - that seems to be an emergent property of H20 molecules coalescing together and producing a new state through their interaction that is entirely unique and unpredictable. Gravity, which no one can explain, might be another such emergent property. It’s a convenient analogy and also a useful metaphor.

It helps to consider the compositional and performance techniques. Mortal Engine is danced against a pure white rectangle of stage that can be angled up. Digital projection is used to create subtractive textures, where light is omitted to generate a false shadow than can be edged with colour. As the dancers move across the stage they can be enveloped in sinister accretions of shadow, or wrestle their own image. By inversion, darkened figures can be overwritten with scratches of intense light. Later great arcs of green argon laser light projected into smoke, further intensifies the complexities in the visual field. Real shows play against fictive projects overlayed with energized patterns and textures, linked with the dance and the musical soundscape.

There is much more here than the sum of the parts.

On first encounters it seems as if the dancers might be chasing projected video animations but the precise alignment and complex interplays of real and fictive shadows point to more sophisticated methods. In a recent interview with Inframe.TV choreographer and director Gideon Obarzanek revealed the core elements of the technical platform - an infrared camera able to detect the dancers and adumbrate their forms is linked to computerized image analysis that responds to the dancers’ kinetics allowing digitally generated textures to be over-projected.

The illusions are striking. What is more important however is that the dance, visual projection and music are interlinked, one literally resonating into to the other. The dance triggers mapping subroutines and the visuals interface with music that is analytically reduced into its harmonic components and projected back as filtered and sometimes manipulated visual textures. The result is that each performance of Mortal Engine, while recognizably similar, is unique in the modes and measures of its emergence.

And I suspect that there is some still deeper thinking behind this work. - Obarzanek speaks of the shadows representing “ the most perfect or sinister of souls” and elsewhere of “moments of exquisite cosmological perfection…driven forward by the reality of permanent change”. I can not help thinking here of the long history of western thought on the soul, from its pre-Homeric conception as a Shade; a shadowy image of the dead lurking in the underworld, to the more parsed and expanded Pythagorean and Platonic versions of immortal, personised and moral souls that still inform our dominant religions and remain immanent in popular culture.

Similar thoughts apply to the music and its interpolations - the extraction of harmonics and their visual representation as loops of laser light seem too close to Pythagoras’ discoveries of the underlying (cosmic) mathematics in music to be mere coincidence in Robin Fox’s work on composer Ben Frost’s score.

Yet for all its underlying computation ingenuity and intrinsic emergent potentials, Mortal Engine still reads in the mind primarily as a dance work, simply because the emergent derivatives that feed back over the dancers as sound and light can only be as good as the primary signal, and that signal - the dance - is excellent. This is just a great show to experience. It can be enjoyed on that level alone, but few will find this a work without deep, even profound resonances.

Mortal Engine by Chunky Moves
At the Malthouse theatre until 13 March and , from 5-15 May at the Sydney Theatre.

Gideon Obarzanek, Direction and choreography
Frieder Weiss, Interactive system design
Robin Fox, Laser and sound artist
Ben Frost, Composer

PERFORMERS
Kristy Ayre
Sara Black
Amber Haines
Antony Hamilton
Marnie Palomares
Lee Serle
James Shannon
Adam Synnott
Charmene Yap
Jorijn Vriesendorp