Chunky Move’s latest piece U>N>I>T>E>D premiered at the Asia TOPA festival in Melbourne in 2025 as a co-commissioned work supported by Asia TOPA, Arts Centre Melbourne, Perth Festival and Singapore’s Esplanade Theatres on the Bay.
With this bevvy of Asia-Pacific backers it’s easy to see their enthusiasm to support the company’s Artistic Director Antony Hamilton in his collaboration with Indonesian sound artists Gabber Modus Operandi (GMO) and Bali-based fashion designers Future Loundry in this latest immersive contemporary dance work.
Alongside GMO and Future Loundry, Chunky Move’s U>N>I>T>E>D has also been brought to life by Australian lighting designer Nicholas Moloney, stage and set designer Ashley Buchanan, and six of the most adept and interesting contemporary dancers on the world’s stages today.
While the director’s chosen creatives are all strong artists in their own right, their combined forces also prove a great match for Hamilton’s signature choreographic style, and his bent towards pulsing house beats, brash patterns and harsh lighting effects to conjure foreboding scenes that fire the imagination and overwhelm the senses.
But these elements alone are not enough to create a great work.
Chunky Move’s U>N>I>T>E>D review – quick links
Tech-doom landscapes dominate from the start
While U>N>I>T>E>D’s sound score by GMO is tremendously good – delivering a thrilling mix of throbbing house beats that are at times layered with traditional transcendental Indonesian chants and laser-like electronics – and Buchanan’s mechanical set deftly conjures the dark undercurrents of Hamilton’s futures (or are they archaic pasts?), its separate scenes rarely congeal as a ‘united’ whole and by the end, it feels largely unresolved and inconclusive.
From the work’s first breath, we are plunged into a menacing world of tech-ridden debris – a scene that is watched over and surveilled by a large, robotic, scrambled-chord ‘evil eye’ set piece (created by Creature Technology Co.).
Two dancers – Madeleine Bowman and Melissa Pham – soon face off against each other as if in a duel. They stride and lunge from opposing sides of the stage, launching their steely, extended limbs in attack while writhing in tortured agony. These aggressive, defiant creatures are here to do battle and survive in a post-apocalyptic world where anarchy reigns after a great (presumably tech-fuelled) collapse.
These two dancers and their four other comrades in this work are all highly articulate and at times mesmerising to behold. A stunning solo mid-way through the work by Samakshi Sidhu is a clear highlight, as is a final duet by David Prakash and Jayden Wall.
However, the dancers are sometimes not given that much to work with choreographically, and some of the work’s dance sequences feel underdone and somewhat predictable against the imaginative fire of the performers’ energy, and the work’s incredible sound score and impressive lighting design.
Retro sci-fi aesthetics applied to what end?
Another noticeable weakness of this Chunky Move piece is in its evocation of well-worn (and decidedly retro) scenes of sci-fi dystopias without reference to the present moment. In these times when our collective faith in ‘machine mysticism’ is arguable reaching an unnerving zenith, it seems strange not to link at least some of the work’s ideas with these urgent contemporary themes.
Instead, Hamilton’s U>N>I>T>E>D kingdom draws heavily on worlds already envisioned by film directors like Ridley Scott in Blade Runner (1982) as well as Rachel Talalay in Tank Girl (1995) and James Cameron in the Terminator franchise (1984 & 1994). Hints of the latest Star Wars epics are also alluded to as we follow its six tortured creatures through their hazardous tech-junk wastelands.
To be clear, there is no crime in resurrecting the tones and textures of Tank Girl or Terminator II (on the contrary – those worlds are great, bring them on!) but if the ideas don’t go beyond reruns of those trippy dystopias, one has to ask – what’s the point?
That question (among others) runs throughout U>N>I>T>E>D’s first 50 minutes, until the work reaches its final five-minute scene. It’s only in these dying moments that some answers finally appear.
When dancers David Prakash and Jayden Wall shed their metallic carapaces and dance bare-chested – drenched in sweat and surrendering to nature and humanity’s greater forces – we are afforded glimpses of what’s underneath.
This climactic scene brings some clarity and deeper interest to the piece as a whole – it’s just a shame this compelling turning point comes so late in the day.
Chunky Move’s U>N>I>T>E>D is a work with an outstanding sound score, excellent design and an immaculate cast. Yet some of its choreography and structural choices hold it back from being a more coherent mystical journey. Instead, it seems to plunge us both forward – and back – to chaotic worlds where Cambrian life coexists with cyborgs in a swirling swamp-like morass, which, while interesting, doesn’t reach the transcendental heights nor the moments of conceptual clarity that it could.
