Reviews

Real Time
April - May 2003
www.realtimearts.net
By Jonathan Marshall

Lives Collaged

The contention that our sense of self is not unified, but rather radically split and divided, has a long history in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy. After World War 2, this idea became particularly associated with theories about memory and sensation. Put simply, our concept of the self is an illusion which, upon closer examination, is revealed to consist of nothing more than a blizzard of free-floating sensations, memories, fragments and moments, a shattered pattern of pieces hanging in a corrosive sea of time—“like tears in the rain” as the replicants of Blade Runner tell us.

Though this is an evocative proposition, it has become a cliché of contemporary avant-garde art, underpinning operatic performances as varied as Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela, Company In Space’s The Light Room and the Philip Glass, Robert Wilson masterpiece Einstein on the Beach. The overwhelming mastery of the latter work especially means that it is a brave artist who draws upon such models today.

At first glance, choreographer Simon Ellis’ Indelible seems to rest on this much-tilled soil. Fragments of recalled memories are replayed as video and sound. Furtive resting-places are briefly established within the gallery, while the audience cautiously moves about, trying to capture these elusive moments. Smoky pools of light bounce off the white walls as the performers write on surfaces in a failed attempt to diarise their thoughts. Even the movement seems to come and go, to suggest and glance off firmer shapes and emotions, without actually capturing any entirely established world or event. It’s all shards and pieces, scraps and patches, in which even the possibility of actually seeing every moment of the performance is deliberately denied the audience in the absence of a stage, defined seating area or other formal certainty.

The effect is entirely consonant with the idea of the divided self, but somewhere something darker, more ecstatic and more imponderable occurs. Moments recur, touches and elements are evoked and return in a deferred sense, but a kind of gentle chaos intrudes. Where Jenny Kemp paints characters who finally become resolved to their expanded, multiple sense of self, Ellis produces something closer to a mnemonic auto-da-fé. The pieces represented are not so much knitted back together to form a collage as they are broken, erased and pushed even further into a propulsive, unarrested formlessness. With only the barest temporal and emotional rises, Ellis creates a sense of an increasing trajectory of shattering and division. The final image is of a woman dressed in white, prone, mouth open as water (white with the light upon it and the walls behind it) drips into her throat, an absent, almost sadomasochistically-consumed blankness written on her face and body. As one of the texts inscribed on the walls during the show reads: “She sat on the bank and drank oblivion of her former life.” What is left remains blurred even within the memories of the spectators.

Indelible, Choreography & video Simon Ellis, dramaturgy Tamara Saulwick, sound Lydia Teychenne, lighting Alycia Hevey, design/installation Elizabeth Boyce, costume Marion Boyce, performers Natalie Cursio, Suzannah Edwards, Marion Jenkins, West Space Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 1-15.

 

The Australian
7 February 2003
By Lee Christofis

Melbourne-based choreographer Simon Ellis has recently taken to making dancers for compact gallery spaces, appropriate for this thirtysomething artist who patinates his work with a high visual arts finish, usually by way of exquisite lighting, sound and textiles. Like his own muscular movement and loaded presence, these are Ellis's hallmarks.

He uses voiceover, words on walls, projected images and video to add dramaturgical complexities to disjointed dances and episodes in his investigation of the nature, reliability and manipulation of memory. Much less concerned with spectacle than with engendering deep engagement, this approach coalesced brilliantly in last year's solo Full, which scored him two Victorian Green Room award nominations.

Indelible is more diffuse, and subsequently less cohesive, the focus shifting constantly across three dancers (the excellent Natalie Cursio, Suzannah Edwards and Marion Jenkins) and West Space's three chambers. The unseated audience (maximum 20) reframes its view each time the focus moves, making it very intriguing.

The diverse, rich material is danced against walls or in open spaces as voiceovers recall jumbled voices, laughter, a child being sick in the schoolyard. The most intense moment finds them lying with heads propped against the wall, like girls in a dormitory, pelvises and abdomens rising, quivering like some exotic fish, then relaxing as feet twist and push the air. Defiance and collusion merge here.

In another episode, a wall text, "She is slipping out of your arms, out of your world", is spoken; later, dance phrases suggest absence or coma then, finally, relinquishment as Edwards lies exhausted, her life force fading as water drips, like unending time, on her neck.

The Age
4 February 2003
By Hilary Crampton

Once more choreographer Simon Ellis has made a work that revels in the microcosmic. Indelible is a delicate evocation of memory, of the ways we structure fragments of our past to create a sense of self in the present.

The net effect is the result of elegantly integrated elements from his team of collaborators in a work that defies easy categorisation under the usual art-form labels.

Presented in the stark white rooms of West Space Gallery, the action, often positioned against the walls, could itself be seen as visual art. Events shift from loft to room to corridor to corner - the audience following clues like the docile crowds at a blockbuster art exhibition.

The action is overlaid with a sound score by Lydia Teychenne consisting of half articulated descriptions of events and sensations. It is mostly spoken in the third person yet suggests that the speaker is reflecting on her own experience.

Other sounds reinforce the feeling of things past, the rattling whir of a home movie projector, echoing footsteps, dripping water. The structural complexity of the score prevents these predictable cues from becoming cliches.

The performers - Natalie Cursio, Suzannah Edwards and Marion Jenkins - unobtrusively slip between the onlookers to surprise us with their next appearance. On occasion the three are dispersed throughout the space so that the audience must choose which action to follow. This increases the sense of memory's unreliability and fragility.

Occasionally the actual action is paralleled by video manipulated to make the virtual performance seem transparent, jerky, confused.

The performers are clothed in flimsy attire, nightgowns or petticoats that imply a childlike naivety and vulnerability.

One is never sure whether the performers are figments of the same personality or separate entities. Gazes evade each other, gestures connecting as if not quite sure whether it is their own or someone else's skin they caress. Alycia Hevey's lighting highlights peripheral details. Tendrils of hair become magnified in silhouette, shadows inform of actual happenings.

Artist Elizabeth Boyce has extended this sense of liminality by inscribing the walls with barely visible words - their presence made evident by a soft luminosity.

Indelible teases the audience with its hide-and-seek shift around the gallery, demanding active engagement. Spectacle is avoided, yet there is enough sense of the familiar for viewers to develop their own narrative.

 

The Herald Sun
3 February 2003
By Stephanie Glickman

Choreographer Simon Ellis begins this year's dance calendar with a site-specific dance installation that gives audiences freedom to investigate the performance more intimately than in a theatre.

Ellis and collaborative team have set up West Space's three-room gallery into a slightly domesticated, very white environment for Indelible.

The pristine venue is almost ghostly, with visual artist Elizabeth Boyce's white-on-white paintings creating a wallpaper of repetitive patterns and Alycia Hevey's simple, thoughtfully-placed lights forging a pathway for viewers to journey through the environment.

Indelible's focus and strength is the power of the still (or only slightly moving) images. They are beautifully displayed - a body hanging in low light on a ceiling ledge, a dancer lying twisted with her open mouth collecting water from a dripping tap above and three females slumped under hanging lights.

The images are so penetrating that Indelible's other elements - the voiceover text, the choreography and the conceptual ideas about memories - seem built around them and do not always have as much impact.

Ellis usually dances in his works but with Indelible he turns the performing over to three women, Natalie Cursio, Suzannah Edwards and Marion Jenkins.

They capture a sense of the fleeting in delicate gestures or moments of slippery hand-holding as they use all corners and hallways of the space.

Indelible is an abstract and subtle performance that challenges the viewer to be both watcher and participant.

 

 

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