A small curation of works by eight choreographers and dance companies, DanceX might fly under the radar for most, but is filled with treasures. Flesh Vessel by Melissa Pham and Jayden Lewis Wall is certainly one of them.
The choreographic trio of Pham, Wall and Nikki Tarling, flows in harmony among the presence of each other’s bodies and movements, interlocking like a human puzzle at times and pushing momentum from one limb to the another like a ripple at others.
DanceX: Flash Vessel
Flesh Vessel is a slow burn, carefully setting its perimeters (black strokes on a white canvas) then expanding beyond them as the pace quickens in the second half of the 45-minute show. What you see at the start evolves through a process of shedding – off with the balaclavas and coats – and once at its core, the choreography intensifies to a mesmerising climax.
Wall delivers some of the performance’s strongest solo choreographies with skill and grace, flipping and turning with admirable physicality and sensitivity. Pham and Tarling are equally arresting, at times acting as each other’s shadow in a slow prowl.
Sound signals another layer of movement, while lighting creates theatrical moments that simultaneously frames and flattens the dancers’ bodies so that rather than individuals or ‘others’, they are universal – reminding ourselves of our own flesh vessels, the capacity to spin, shake, twist, and lean on each other.
Flesh Vessel is presented as part of DanceX – A Festival of Dance (The Australian Ballet), on at Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio from 8-11 October; tickets.
Also on ArtsHub: Rebecca review: a dark and deathly dream at the MTC
The incomparable Nikki Shiels emerges out of darkness, an eerie ghost light burning in the near distance as a clamouring absence looms large behind her.
‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,’ her unnamed woman says, emitting the astonishing opening line of Daphne Du Maurier’s deliciously disturbing 1938 gothic novel, Rebecca.
That lilting rhyme, burnt into our collective consciousness like quicklime, strikes at the hollow heart of Manderley’s cursed stately pile. Du Maurier herself said that the place is, ‘As much an atmosphere as a tangible erection’.
Rebecca: a new adaptation
MTC’s artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks leans into that ether with her at once sprawling and yet claustrophobic new adaptation, previously tackled for the stage by Du Maurier herself and, of course, by Alfred Hitchcock on the silver screen.
Silently swooshing flats swoop from the wings of the Sumner Theatre to stir up this stifling oblivion, an all-encompassing gloom that threatens to drown our narrator, clad in a shapeless cricketer’s jumper and boxy dress, and anyone who lingers in this forsaken place.
One moment she is stultified, stuck by the side of her distanced husband, the surly, sealed-in-aspic Maxim de Winter (Stephen Philips). The next, we’re swept backwards as she’s struck senseless by his presence across a Monte Carlo dining room, while bound as a companion to Pamela Rabe’s brash Mrs Van Hopper, a grasping American snatching at de Winter’s wealth and status.
Bowled over by Maxim’s attentions on long drives and ominous glares over precipitous cliffs, the woman falls for an idea of him utterly divorced from reality, agreeing to marry him. Startled by his suddenness, doubts soon break the still surface between them.
Rebecca: to Manderley
And so we arrive, via a truncated honeymoon in the teeming throng of Venice’s peak season canals, in the rugged beauty of Cornwall and Maxim’s ancestral home. The one he once shared with Rebecca, the ghost that inescapably haunts the new Mrs de Winter, Maxim and his always hovering housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (also Rabe).
Tony Award-winning designer Marg Horwell, envisioning both Rebecca’s set and costumes, summons its ‘atmosphere’ ingeniously. Manderley’s echoing halls are as much what’s not there as what is, exposing most of the stage’s black box. Fourth wall-diving stagehands emerge from the inky sea bearing pyres of desiccating flowers, ossified furniture and shrouded mannequins on which Rebecca’s finest hang.
