Conceived, directed and choreographed by Dancenorth Associate Artistic Director Amber Haines and Artistic Director and Co-CEO Kyle Page, 'RED' illuminates the universal challenge of our survival in a spellbinding contemporary dance production that unfolds like an epic, intimate allegorical poem.
Taking our seats on stage at Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s Playhouse, we’re met by a large, translucent inflatable structure between two sections of audience seating. Within this structure are two dancers in a seated embrace, lightly, yet almost mechanically stroking one another.
Over the next 45 minutes, air from within this structure will gradually be removed.
With an ominous soundscape and striking visual starkness, the performance space containing just the inflatable shell and two artists whose physical resemblance renders them almost identical, with their flaming manes of curly red hair, pale skin and identical light pink long pants and tops – Dancenorth uses the plight of its dancers as an allegory for a contracting world. A world where biodiversity is progressively being suffocated and silenced.
Dancers Marlo Benjamin and Michael Smith are exemplary. The fluidity with which they move in, with, between, around and completely synched with one another is astonishing. I have never seen anything like it. There are many moments throughout the performance where I’m bracing for an agonising collision between these two due to the physicality of strong, wild movements performed in incredibly close physical proximity. It never comes. Their spatial awareness of each other, the trust and sensitivity in their interactions are remarkable.
Image © David Kelly
For the entire performance I feel like I am watching two bodies that are somehow breathing with a single set of lungs and being driven by the pumping of a single heart.
Breathtaking in its intimacy and virtuosity, 'RED' is a riveting dance work that asks us to confront the unsettling consequences of our (humanity's) continual dissociation from nature and the natural world. It compels us to face the dystopian worldview we stubbornly resist through the blind pursuit of our comfortable existence in a bubble, where sustaining diverse and resilient social and biological ecosystems are not the most fundamental and urgent issues of the day.
And when the lights go off on the two dancers, now in a pure expression of vulnerability – entirely nude – and vacuum sealed beneath the air-less bubble, the cost of this hubris is explicit.
'RED' is a brilliant piece of performance art.
