Reviews

Stage Left (www.stageleft.com.au/full.html) 1 July 2001
reviewed by Ben Zipper

With Full, independent dance choreographer Simon Ellis has crafted a minutely detailed and effectively flawless dance installation.

Both globally and locally, dance is becoming big again. Moulin Rouge has popularised its traditions on the silver screen, Tivoli has rekindled it on stage for the Federation Festival, and locally Chunky Move has enlarged its scope in an inner-city warehouse with Arcade.

In contrast - in the face of these large audience pullers - Full is a tiny piece, a thirty-minute installation in a North Melbourne terrace gallery space about as big as a postage stamp.

Its themes are both macro and micro. An elderly woman's voice tells us she's 87 years old, and that she's "lived through two world wars and one marriage". The audience - maximum of forty per performance - stands around the gallery with ($2 donation) wines, and waits.

Strategically placed speakers emit a soundscape of an old and young voice, minutely precise and detailed rhythms and earthly textures. Lighting cues lead our vision around the darkened gallery, as Ellis emerges, performs then lapses back into shadows, interspersed with film projection and slide photography.

Full is technically a solo dance piece, but nevertheless a rich collaboration of talents. Visual artist Elizabeth Boyce worked with Ellis previously on Semi-detached (poss. 2nd bdrm) (1999), here working on the installation, photography and designs.

The sound is more embodied than the piece in the gallery, Jacqueline Grenfell making great use of the space and the themes. Like Ellis, Grenfell is a VCA graduate, with a background in acoustic music. Her crisp, non-sentimentalised soundscape is a compelling glue that holds together the aesthetic elements.

Personally, I was less concerned with the content of the piece than its execution. Rare is the opportunity to witness a dance piece at such close range in such an intimate setting. Every muscle inflection from Ellis is telling, every twitch a composition in itself. Ellis is evidently capable of much bolder and physically demanding movements, but his reserve and restraint is testimony to his talent and mettle.

Like other local soloists - such as Cazerine Barry - Ellis is a quiet mover, shaking established norms from his own small branch. Very much out there, very much worth noting.

The Age (27 June 2001)
reviewed by Hilary Crampton

Full, a new work by independent dance artist Simon Ellis, is not easily labelled. Ellis calls it an installation, and given its location in the tiny Glass Street Gallery, that seems apt. Elizabeth Boyce's carefully placed words and photographs reinforce this aspect. But it also has a strong sense of theatre, drawing on texts that include the musings of his grandmother as well as Marcel Proust, John O'Donohue, and Janet Frame.

These form part of Jacqueline Grenfell's soundscape, scattered between sibilant whisperings, scratchings and scuttlings, which in the pitch dark of the tiny space acquire intensity. Intensity is the essence of this work, which makes everyday life, actions and sounds seem loaded with import. Ellis performs a series of small cameos in different locations, interspersed with total blackness, which is sometimes filled with sound, sometimes simply with the rustlings of our actions as we are left to wonder where the action will happen next.

For the audience, it is a sort of adventure; a journey from one side of the room to the other, never quite sure where we are heading, our eyes finding the mark through Alycia Hevey's cleverly orchestrated lighting design that makes a virtue of the limited possibilities such a space imposes. Hevey's precision is supplemented by slides and video created by Ellis, which act in counterpoint to the actions, creating a curious sense of dislocation of time and place.

At one point we watch images of his grandmother, while a child's lisping voice tells the narrative of a photograph album. At another, as he flattens himself against a wall, a tiny image of her appears to glow from the centre of his chest. Our ancestors are present in our bones and blood. The sense of dislocation is compounded by a video of Ellis, rising as if peeling away from his supine body, which progressively sheds its everyday clothes until he is fully naked. At the same time, Ellis is in the room with us, donning the abandoned clothes in real time while he also watches the video - audience and performer both.

The movement is varied. Our first view is of a naked body, suspended horizontally in a cage, the form indistinct, until arms unfold and fingers delicately stretch, stroke and curl. Later he seems trapped, ricocheting between two walls, his actions confined yet forceful. He slips into an almost neanderthal action, arms hanging, back stooped, then suddenly darts out, his arms becoming wings, his spine lengthening.

The final image is both poignant and eerie. Out of the blackness he appears outside the space, his body bathed in light and flattened against the skylight, while Janet Frame's words recur - "I have nothing to say to the dead unless they approach me first". The lights die away but he remains, lit only by the glow of a Melbourne night.

The title leaves much to our imagination - full of what? It is a delicate compilation of the multitude of layers that comprise a human life, offering intimations of mortality and immortality. In both form and situation it challenges notions of performance, placing us in intimate proximity to the performer. We share the same space, our actions will influence his actions. Full refuses simplistic categorisation - blurring boundaries between art forms. The impact is both subtle and powerful, a sensitive counterfoil to much of the high impact dance currently in vogue. Thank heavens! There is still some diversity in Melbourne's dance menu.

Inpress 11 July 2001
Reviewed by Rose Mulready

Full is a fascinating work that shows what one man with a Visa card, a vision and some talented friends can achieve. Simon Ellis is an independent dancer and choreographer; Full is a subtle examination of aged women through dance, video and a marvellous soundscape by Jacqueline Grenfell. The tiny space of the Glass Street Gallery is transformed and expanded. Darkness is used to heighten the senses, shifting them away from the visual; when light is restored, Ellis is suspended naked on a glass platform above the audience. The show takes on the quality of a slide show, with each return of light revealing Ellis in a new position. The voices of women recount their thoughts and experiences. The dressing and undressing of the body, mimic the layers of time and memory. The choreography is necessarily confined, but precise and expressive. The last image - Ellis, in a thirties suit, pressed against the glass of an upstairs window like a returning ghost - will linger in the imagination.

Real Time August 2001
Reviewed by Philipa Rothfield

Simon Ellis’ Full is a delicate piece in comparison [to Lousie Taube's Pervert]. Set in the tiny Glass Street Gallery, North Melbourne, it begins with the sounds of Simon’s grandmother. She speaks with simplicity of her life, nearly over. She tells us of her work, the loss of her husband, the cat she misses. Ellis lies in a glass box, suspended over the onlookers. Naked almost, he is born unto this piece. We hear more about the grandmother as Ellis descends amongst us to dance a life over time. Slides of her are projected onto his white shirt, words spoken by a young voice, displacing the logic of time just enough. The final image ensues from her remark that the dead are outside, wanting in. Ellis places himself against the roof’s skylight. The cold pink of the sky beckons his silhouette. The dead are there, amongst us. Whether we see them depends upon whether or not we look.

The Australian unpublished review June 2001
Reviewed by Lee Christofis

Simon Ellis is a reflective, 32-year-old independent dance artist, born in New Zealand, living in Melbourne and dancing in both places. Along with others who eschew the current vogue of high octane kinetics and cheeky, convoluted theatrics, Ellis offers a different aesthetic experience. He specialises in dances of constrained virtuosity with a distinctive sculptural effect, appearing sometimes as the finely honed central object in a spatially dynamic installation; his investigations of interior imaginings suit his adopted formal, almost modernist performance style.

Full is inspired by Ellis's grandmother, NZ painter Gladys Eastwood, whose short term memory loss raises in Ellis concerns for the way the elderly are increasingly uncared for in our society. Becoming neither an old lady nor anybody else in particular, he appears vulnerable and confused in a montage of episodes which are simultaneously unfathomable and transparent to anyone who has observed someone losing their memory.

Repeated episodes of darkness plunge the roving audience into mystery and anticipation until he appears unexpectedly near or amongst them. At first, naked, lying flat in a transparent box strapped to the ceiling, he squirms, muttering, trying to feel his torso through the plastic casing. Then he appears, in briefs, writhing on a balcony, caged by its railings and their shadows.

An unforgettable metaphor of feeling dead or just partly alive emerges in a series of slides of Ellis projected on a wall, flat on his back then curling to stand, like Lazarus, until each new sequence strips away his clothing and the images blur, caught halfway between action and stasis. Elsewhere, in shirt and tie, he is a living screen for snapshots of his grandmother as younger voices recall happy childhood events.

Surrounded by the audience, and overtaken by a frustrated, simian demeanour, he swings his body, arms dangling then twisting inwards or into sharp winging arcs. A terror at not remembering, or even knowing what it is not to remember - and a instinctive desire for intimacy - seems to infuse all these movements. His final appearance, in suit, tie and hat, hovering over the space as he lies on the outside of the gallery's skylight, is transcendent. The audience barely breathes, long after the light fades.

Ellis's collaborators help to make Full a humanising and poignant experience. Alycia Hevey's lighting bleeds out of pitch blackness into Richard Manning's shadowy white spaces to echo the distress, confusion and tenderness suffusing Ellis's face, seen up close in the tight gallery space holding 30 people. Jacqueline Grenfell's sound is minimal but eloquent - repeated metallic tones, steel blades on flinty ground, unidentifiable instruments, women's voices revealing pasts and a knowledge of the dead who gather under trees and "have no memory". Fragments from Marcel Proust and Janet Frame, along with photographic images by Elizabeth Boyce and Ellis add to the psychological texture of the piece with finely judged economy.

Ellis writes that "FULL is a small event … for old people, and people who are getting older." Its brevity at just half an hour, disappearing like another longed for memory is apt, but left one wanting more, much more. No-one wanted to leave, not even the younger people there.