Cut Away (in development) - Animal Farm Collective
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Cut Away (in development) Animal Farm Collective PRODUCED BY PERFORMING LINES 5/245 Chalmers St Redfern NSW 2016 Australia P + 612 9319 0066 www.performinglines.org.au Contact: Fenn Gordon fenn@performinglines.org.au
ABOUT THE SHOW Memory is fleeting and film can be edited, so let's reinvent ourselves from the ground up and pretend. Two workmen enter a space, empty except for an old piano neglected in the corner, and begin to transform it in a functional choreography of ladders, drop sheets and paint. A frame takes shape, almost by accident. They step through it, the colour drains away, their movements speed up and take on a jerky rhythm, as they are transported into the world of silent film. Cut Away evokes this world, and explores our uneasy relationship to the past, through the physical language of silent film, and through the curious distancing effect this creates. But everything will be done physically within the space, without resorting to the expedient use of multi- media. It’s just the two extraordinary dancers on a stripped stage, along with composer Iain Grandage, controlling the world behind the screen as he bangs away at the old piano. This highly portable work again showcases the gutsy choreography, surreal imagery and wicked sense of humour seen in previous works lawn* and roadkill*. *lawn and roadkill are works by Splintergroup** ANIMAL FARM COLLECTIVE Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood have established a unique collaborative working relationship, a practice spanning between Germany and Australia, and collaborated on highly successful works which continue to tour. They began working together at Meryl Tankard’s ADT in the early nineties, before moving to Europe and working for leading dance theatre companies, Gavin with Ultima Vez and Grayson with Sasha Waltz and Guests. In 2004 they made lawn with Mark Howett, Iain Grandage and others through the company Splintergroup**. It has been remounted five times and presented in Australia, Germany & Singapore. roadkill premiered in 2007 and has toured to the Barbican, France, Italy, Spain, Canada & Australia. lawn and roadkill between them won six Green Room Awards in 2010. Most recently, they made Food Chain under the name Animal Farm Collective (Sydney Festival, Freiburg & Heidelberg, Germany and St Pölten Austria). Gavin’s other work includes four years as Artistic Director of Dancenorth (2005-9), creating Nightcafe, gravity feed, underneath, Underground and Remember Me. Grayson has worked with choreographers/directors including Joachim Schloemer, Benoît Lachambre, Constanza Marcras, Nasser Martin-Gousett, Luc Dunberry, Eve Sussman and the Rufus corporation, choreographed for the Grand Theatre de Geneve and created the piece Edgar with Claudia de Serpa Soares **Splintergroup consisted of Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood, Michelle Ryan, Gavin Webber Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 2 of 15 Performing Lines
CREATIVE TEAM
Performers Gavin Webber & Grayson Millwood
Composer & Performer Iain Grandage
Design & Lighting Mark Howett
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Touring Party 5 (2 performers, Composer/Performer, Lighting Designer/Operator,
Production/Stage Manager)
Venue Small to medium scale black box or pros arch, but end-on configuration
ideal – in-the-round configurations and widely fanned out seating would be
highly problematic for sightlines.
Production Set will be small scale and highly portable.
DEVELOPMENT TIMELINE
October 2011 Preliminary investigation, one week Berlin
May – June 2012 Development, six weeks Sasha Waltz & Guests, Berlin
Sept – Oct Development & rehearsal, four week s Sasha Waltz & Guests, Berlin
Nov 2 - 5 Premiere Festpielhaus, St Poelten Austria
Dec 2012 Further development, two weeks Critical Path, Sydney
Jan 2013 Further development, two weeks NORPA, Lismore
January 2013 Available for Australian premiere
PRODUCTION HISTORY
YEAR SHOW COMPANY DESTINATION
2011 Food Chain Animal Farm Collective Seymour Centre, Sydney Festival, Australia
Theater Freiburg, Germany
Festspielhaus St Pötten, Austria
Theater Heidelberg, Germany
2010 roadkill Splintergroup* Teatro Toniolo, Venice Biennale, Italy
FACYL Festival, Teatre Liceo, Salamance, Spain
Place del Arts, Montreal, Canada
Harbourfront, Toronto, Canada
2009 Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Australia
Performance Space, Sydney, Australia
Artshouse, Melbourne, Australia
2007 Dance Umbrella, The Barbican, London, UK
2007 lawn Splintergroup* Freiberg, Germany
2006 Singapore Arts Festival, Singapore
Sydney Festival, Australia
Perth Festival, Australia
Sophiensaela, Berlin, Germany
*Splintergroup consisted of Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood, Michelle Ryan, Gavin Webber
Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 3 of 15 Performing LinesBACKGROUND We all remove aspects of our past, which are not agreeable with our present. Cut Away deals with the removal and doctoring of a past that refuses to stay put. The past can be manipulated, like a reel of film being edited, or a photo being cut up and pasted back together. In Paul Auster's short story The Invention of Solitude, the author discovers a family portrait clearing out his father's house following his death: “A whole world seems to emerge from this portrait: a distinct time, a distinct place, an indestructible sense of the past. The first time I looked at the picture, I noticed it had been torn down the middle and then clumsily mended, leaving one of the trees in the background hanging eerily in mid-air. I assumed the picture had been torn by accident and thought no more about it. The second time I looked at it, however, I studied this tear more closely and discovered things I must have been blind to miss before. I saw a man's fingertips grasping the torso of one of my uncles; I saw, very distinctly, that another of my uncles was not resting his hand on my brother's back, as I had first thought, but against a chair that was not there. And then I realized what was strange about the picture: my grandfather had been cut out of it. The image was distorted because part of it had been eliminated. My grandfather had been sitting in a chair next to his wife with one of his sons standing between his knees - and he was not there. Only his fingertips remained: as if he were trying to crawl back into the picture from some hole deep in time, as if he had been exiled to another dimension.” What is documented creates the past. If you manipulate the documentation you manipulate the past. After his death in 1949, photos from E.J. Bellocq were found stuffed behind his couch. They were all photographs of prostitutes from the Storyville area. Some were nude, some dressed, others posed as if acting out a mysterious narrative. Many of the faces had been scraped out; whether this was done by Bellocq, his Jesuit priest brother who inherited them after E. J.'s death or someone else is unknown. Bellocq is the most likely candidate, since the damage was done while the emulsion was still wet. Cut Away builds on previous exploration of the representation and limitations of film devices onstage, begun in roadkill. Silent film suggests the skeleton in the cupboard, the past that cannot be suppressed or repressed. Cut Away evokes this world, and explores our uneasy relationship to the past, through the physical languages of silent film, the through the its distinctively jerky rhythms, and through the curious distancing effect this creates. But everything will be done physically within the space through choreography, without resorting to the more expedient use of multi-media. Also thinking about the world we can create behind the screen, narrative, characters, portraying other people, etc. maybe the use of cardboard cutouts? Lots of costume changes. Moving in a strange stilted fashion like the frame rate of old movies. When it blacks out for the text, we could rearrange the scene so that when it comes back it's a long shot, close-up, different angle. How would you make an extreme close- up? Magnification? And of course the eternal question of what we are when we are not in the screen. In the world of silent film, people, cars, and even gun shots have no audible impact. A lone piano provides the only soundscape, it creates or enhances the mood in a soundless world even if, at times, only to cover the sound of the old Nickelodeon projectors. Long fascinated with the sound for silent film, Iain Grandage will not just compose the score, but will also become a character: at times drawn into the action on stage, and at other times controlling the world behind the screen as he bangs away at an old upright piano on the side of stage. Cut Away showcases Gavin and Grayson’s gutsy choreography, surreal imagery and wicked sense of humour. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 4 of 15 Performing Lines
Cut Away marks a return to the creative ensemble approach of lawn, with a small team of four will working closely together from the very outset. Gavin writes: With Cut Away we are returning to the essence of how we first started creating. We wantto rediscover the joy of making dance and the naivety of discovery from our first working process. We are attempting to remove some of the technical complexities that can make touring difficult and also complicate the creation of the work. We are working again as though it was our first piece, made in a simple way with a small band of creators, working together from the outset. We are examining our own performance techniques and questioning the limitations that have occurred through the double role of director and performer. We have a desire to open all possibilities once again, pretending to ourselves that we have never made work before and revisiting the intense desire to manifest one of our passions onto the stage. We will keep the set small and manageable. Cut Away will be a piece that will be easier than any other show to tour, not just for touring purposes but to connect ourselves back to the basic simplicity of being a person on a stage. Our process is fluid to adapt to the circumstances. We work openly and without a final culmination of process. The pieces themselves are never finished in our minds. We keep changing things to keep them alive and fresh, tinkering, adapting, finding new things. We ask our designers to share this ethic and to consider the show an alive thing, not a fixed, unchanging piece of art. It is performance that we are pursuing, not visual art, so it is never finished, never fixed. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 5 of 15 Performing Lines
CRITICAL REVIEWS
These guys make dance like the Coen brothers make films. Lindy Hume, Sydney Festival Director
Food Chain (Animal Farm Collective)
This intelligent and physically explosive work is about to explore the animal in all of us… Webber and
Millwood spearheaded the team that brought together the memorable physical theatre pieces Lawn and
roadkill. Their exceptional physical skill and daring, along with their bold imagination, has not lessened over
the past five years, and it is exciting to see new performers working with them… All the elements are there
for further refinement in this premiere season. And it is already outstanding. The Sydney Morning Herald
This mesmerizing new work by Animal Farm Collective… challenges our perceptions of the world and the
environment we live in… From the opening moment when a mossy Ent-like figure (the spirit of the forest?)
slowly slithered down the tree I was hooked. Arts Hub Australia
Roadkill (Splintergroup)
HOW many superlatives can you fit into one short review? This extraordinary dance work deserves them for
its theatricality, choreography, performing skills and daring, sound, lighting - all combining to make this the
best piece of dance as theatre seen in Sydney since Splintergroup was last here with lawn…
… From flirtation, serious sex, fun, fear and aggression, they move to another level that in literary terms
might be seen as magical realism - the sense of a world beyond the everyday. Film can achieve with ease
but I have never seen it done so well in contemporary dance. Sydney Morning Herald
roadkill is all encompassing physical theatre. Every element of the performance has been developed with
equal attention paid to its evolution, creating a theatrical experience that is complete physically,
aesthetically, visually and aurally. It is exciting and innovative work and sets an admirable benchmark for
physical theatre practitioners not only in Australia, but internationally. Australian Stage Online
Like a good thriller, roadkill puts you on edge and tips you over into the abyss of fright... roadkill is a kind of
Wolf Creek for dance, theatre and contemporary performance audiences. It's not the usual populist fare for
the stage, but here is a work about fear that engenders various states of suspense.
Splintergroup pull this off by first creating a palpable, realtime realism... The challenging shift from realism
to dance in roadkill is dextrously handled ... Without film's advantage of calculated points of view and
editing, roadkill also has to transform literal images into abstract but evocative ones... When passages of
dance in roadkill emerge they seem a naturally fantastic part of this heightened reality. RealTime
lawn (Splintergroup)
Just as James Joyce created the great Irish novel while living abroad, now it seems a truly Australian dance-
theatre masterpiece has emerged from the dour hinterhausen of modern day Berlin … It’s simply one of the
best things you will see in the theatre … A series of physical and imaginative miracles. The Australian
This is deeply exciting dance, physically thrilling (and sometimes even distressing in the anxiety you feel for
the performers), visually beautiful (an extraordinary collapsible set by Zoe Atkinson) and musically brilliant
(Iain Grandage creating a collage of vastly differing styles of music, from achingly lovely cello solos to
German heavy metal).
Emotionally - well, emotionally it's all sorts of things. It's a passionate and unabashed exploration of
masculinity - its aggression, its lostness, its danger, its tenderness, its hilarity - that makes you realise how
exciting the smell of testosterone can be in the theatre. Through the physical language these men create, its
wit and tension and brutality, emerges a profound tenderness, a lyrical delicacy and grace that is almost
classical in its purity of movement.
Theatre Notes
Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 6 of 15 Performing LinesARTIST BIOGRAPHIES Grayson Millwood – Co-Director Grayson worked for Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre for three years before leaving for Europe in 1995. Since then, he has been working for many different choreographers/directors including: Joachim Schloemer, Benoit Lachambre, Constanza Marcras, Nasser Martin-Gousett, Luc Dunberry, Eve Sussman and the Rufus corporation. In 1999 he moved to Berlin to join Sasha Waltz and Guests, with whom he still enjoys a continual working relationship. His work includes choreography for the Grand Theatre de Geneve, the piece Edgar in collaboration with Claudia de Serpa Soares, and lawn and roadkill with Splintergroup, and Food Chain with Gavin Webber. Gavin Webber – Co-Director Gavin worked with Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre from 1993 to 1998, then moved to Brussels and worked with Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez for three years. In 2001 he returned to Australia to teach and created lawn with Splintergroup. From 2005 to 2009 he was Artistic Director of Dancenorth and created Nightcafe, gravity feed, underneath, Underground, roadkill and Remember Me. He divides his time between Europe and Australia and has most recently created a new work, Little Pig, that is premiering in Heidelberg, Germany, in October and in Freiburg, Germany in November. Mark Howett – Design & Lighting Mark Howett’s career in theatre began in 1979 as a lighting technician. He quickly progressed to the role of lighting designer and later to set and vision designer. He has designed for many Australian and international theatre, film, dance, and opera companies. He has won a Helpmann Award for Cloudstreet and Greenroom Awards for For the Love of three Oranges and lawn. Mark has also worked cinematographer and lighting and vision designer with the Australian Arts Orchestra and designed for Australian Ballet and Bangarra. In Germany Mark has designed the lighting for Constanza Macras, Sasha Waltz and Guest and Köln Schauspielhaus. Recent work includes designs for the UK touring productions of Evita, Joseph and his Technicoloured Coat and Blood Brothers for Bill Kenwright Productions, and for Splintergroup’s lawn and roadkill, for which he and Benjamin Cisterne received a Green Room Award nomination for Best Design. Iain Grandage – Composer & Performer Iain Grandage is currently Composer-in-Residence with the Youth Orchestras of Australia, having most recently completed a similar residency with the WA Symphony Orchestra. He has won Helpmann and Green Room Awards for theatre scores, which include Cloudstreet, The Blue Room, Babes in the Wood, Plainsong, Merry-Go-Round in the Sea & True West. He has been a member of Bulletin Magazine’s Smart 100, and has won APRA/AMC awards for his orchestral works, and has orchestrated songs for Ben Folds, Augie March, Tim & Tex and the Whitlams. He has composed an opera for children, scores for dance projects, and incidental music for BBC Radio3 and Radio4. In 1996 and 1998, Iain was musical director and arranger for the national tours of Jimmy Chi’s multi award winning Corrugation Road, and his involvement with indigenous musicians has continued through his collaborations with the Spinifex people of central Australia, initially on the theatre work Career Highlights of the Mamu, and more recently with concert works in collaboration with WASO, and Topology. A documentary on these collaborations titled 'Ooldea' aired on ABC TV in March 2007. His concert compositions have been performed throughout Australia and overseas by the Australian Voices, Australian Boys’ Choir, St Peter’s Chorale, Collegium Musicum, WA Youth Orchestra and the WA Symphony Orchestra. As a performer, he plays in the funk cello band wood, contemporary ensemble Pi, the Australian Art Orchestra, and moonlights with a cabaret singer called Meow Meow. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 7 of 15 Performing Lines
SELECT REVIEWS OF FOOD CHAIN IN FULL Animal Farm Collective – Food Chain Sydney Morning Herald by Jill Sykes 24 January 2011 A BEAR observes the audience as we sit down; it sits so still on a camping stool that we might not notice it in a moonlit forest scene populated with smaller wild creatures that have been through the hands of a taxidermist. But it is offering us a clue: this intelligent and physically explosive work is about to explore the animal in all of us. Directors Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood have said they liked the idea of "animals experimenting on humans, viewing them like a David Attenborough documentary in reverse". This turns out to be only a fraction of the action that unrolls, dramatically and wittily. Almost everything is conveyed by movement alone - mostly robust encounters between various combinations of bears and humans but also a lyrical interlude of shadowplay and a pivotal engagement with a giant dead tree that dominates the stage. Spoken word, however, is essential for the Attenborough-style conversation and it emerges cleverly (and probably essentially, owing to the bear costumes) from an independent source that adds to the amusement. Themes twist and turn in their exploration of the line that divides, sometimes tenuously, humans and animals. Appetites for food and sex, communication and alienation, trigger surprises that won't be revealed here. Suffice to say that performers disappear and reappear in different guises - at what point does the human turn into an animal or vice versa? Is this a dream or a long hidden inclination? The dead tree is designed as the ultimate climbing tool and becomes a central player in the show. Having participated from the start, it provides the climax as everyone in the cast clambers around and down it in a self-renewing "food chain". Their choreographed scrambling is breathtaking in its tough beauty and themes; it offers a conclusion of a kind and a visual highlight. Webber and Millwood spearheaded the team that brought together the memorable physical theatre pieces lawn and roadkill. Their exceptional physical skill and daring, along with their bold imagination, has not lessened over the past five years, and it is exciting to see new performers working with them: Kate Harman, Gabrielle Nankivell, Tommy Noonan and Joshua Thomson. One minor reservation is that the strength of the through-line that powered Roadkill is missing. Food Chain's episodic construction is obvious and a couple of sequences may go on too long but all the elements are there for further refinement in this premiere season. And it is already outstanding. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 8 of 15 Performing Lines
Animal Farm Collective – Food Chain Arts Hub Australia by Lynne Lancaster 25 January 2011 Once upon a time in a forest... This mesmerizing new work by Animal Farm Collective (Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood, who previously brought us the fabulous Lawn in 2006, working as Splintergroup) challenges our perceptions of the world and the environment we live in. An analysis of how humans affect the world, and of our body language – as seen from a bear’s point of view – it could also be seen as an exploration of ‘releasing the inner animal’ and how booted, be-suited corporate humans still climb the ‘food chain’. Moritz Muller’s exciting set includes several stuffed animals (e.g. a deer, a pig, a fox, a badger) plus the vitally important, wonderfully textured, solid tree that the marvelous dancers (a cast of six – Millwood, Webber, Kate Harman, Gabrielle Nankivell, Tommy Noonan, and Joshua Thomson) sit in/lie on/slide up and down. There’s also a tent and scattered bits of camping equipment on the stage, against a delightful backdrop of trees. From the opening moment when a mossy Ent-like figure (the spirit of the forest?) slowly slithered down the tree I was hooked. In the topsy-turvy surrealist world of Food Chain, bears are the leaders and social predators who sit highest in the food chain. They conduct experiments to see how much of the inner animal is left in humanity. They mastermind psychological traps in order to explore human beings’ animal instincts. What follows is social and sexual chaos. Ferociously attacking a camping human couple, the bears kill the female, and then use her body, manipulating it like a puppet, in an attempt to lure the human male down from the tree where he has taken refuge. The bears end up using an axe to try and cut the tree down. Will it work? There is ironic use of video and technology (the bears film themselves posing after the attacks, and film the audience, making sarcastic comments about humans all the while). Wonderful use of silhouette and shadow puppetry is incorporated in one scene, with the tent as a screen, as various stuffed animals are ‘brought to life’. Particularly memorable is a lyrical dance sequence for the girl and her dream bear lover (the male camper’s mourning fantasies?) which is tender yet wildly erotic. In another section, the stuffed animals are lined up and given a warning lecture on the dangers of bears by an over-enthusiastic park ranger. There is also a scene where the bears lay a trap for humans using a tape recorder playing a tape of a crying baby, wrapped in a shawl in a stroller. Towards the end, in the ‘real’ world , the two mustachioed ‘bear men’, clad in cream coloured suits, are seemingly benign at first, but soon there is a fight for cigarettes and a lighter, and events go downhill. This section seems to be an analysis of individual vs. pack survival; how do we know who is friend or foe? A seemingly trivial incident can spark things off. One of the men keeps trying to remind the others that ‘it’s me!’ while they run in fear. This leads to a sequence where the pack turns on the outsider (quite vampirishly, going for the throat). Savage destruction and fast and furious movements are contrasted with lighter, gentle scenes. Choreographically, the work is at times sculptural, with a possible Butoh influence; and at other times explosive, energetic, and athletic. The finale, with the entire cast as a seething mass swarming up and down/hanging on/climbing the tree was fabulous. We are what we eat. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 9 of 15 Performing Lines
SELECTED REVIEWS OF ROADKILL IN FULL Splintergroup - roadkill Independent on Sunday by Jenny Gilbert 4 November 2007 A STYLISHLY EXECUTED TALE OF PARANOIA ACHIEVES MORE BY SUGGESTION Barbican Pit, London Stage props perform a distinctly sinister function in roadkill, an intriguing physical-theatre thriller from a Brisbane-based trio called Splintergroup, brought to the UK by Dance Umbrella. Tapping into the myths and paranoia inspired by the vast red-dirt emptiness of the Australian outback, roadkill invites us into the predicament of a couple whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Half-realistic, half hallucinatory, the story is told through the experiences of each of three protagonists: the driver, his girlfriend, and the aggressively friendly stranger who insists on helping them out. Who is most suspicious of whom, you are led to wonder. It's a socking idea, executed with flair: the set is just the car, and a rundown phone kiosk. The car radio provides much of the soundtrack, and lighting marks the progress of night into day into night again, as well as providing look-behind-you tension. One duet – violent or consensual is hard to tell – is lit solely with a hand-held torch, yielding only intermittent clues as to who's still standing. The passing of slow time presents a tactical problem, though. How much birdsong, staring into space and fiddling with a flat mobile can a drama take? The show also lacks dramatic shape – too many episodes, too many climaxes. That said, however, some of those climaxes are riveting: the cringemaking moment when the lovers realise their energetic love-making in the back of the car is being watched; the frenzied sequence when the stranger appears to have stolen the car (the impression of speed achieved by performers dashing past the stationary car with eucalyptus branches; the crash that makes the bodies inside lurch horribly around in slow motion like a TV seatbelt ad. Are these the ravings of heat-stroke, or alternative endings to a human tragedy? It's left to you to decide, as the boyfriend arranges pebbles over his lover's body, produces a toy car (a miniature version of his own, with working headlamps) and proceeds to drive it over the rocky passes of her thighs and stomach. This may be the ultimate wishful hallucination: a car that works. Recommended. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 10 of 15 Performing Lines
Splintergroup - roadkill Toronto Star by Michael Crabb 4 February 2010 roadkill Provides A Daring And Edgy Ride Harbourfront Centre, Toronto If ever you're tempted to take a drive in the Australian Outback, 75 well-spent minutes with roadkill might make you think twice. This daringly inventive piece of physical theatre, which opened at Harbourfront Centre Wednesday night, pitches us into a disorienting series of not always easily connectable situations and events, often stretched to a high level of suspense and occasionally tinged with cinematic horror. It's not that roadkill's Brisbane-based creators bear any apparent personal grudge against that dusty red wilderness. It's just that the almost incomprehensible vastness of the Outback, and the place it commands in the Australian psyche, offer too ripe a territory to resist exploring. The work begins peacefully enough as we find performers Gavin Webber and Gabrielle Nankivell stranded in their beaten-up old Corolla. She sleeps. He attempts to start the car without success, tries the phone in a conveniently nearby call box – out of order, of course – and discovers his cellphone is beyond service range. Imprudently he ends up lying on the ground almost under a front wheel. The woman awakes, shifts herself into the driver's seat and, unaware, tries to start the engine. What if it does start? What about the man? It's our first hint that roadkill is going to be an edgy ride. The mood turns positively sinister when the couple, who've decided to pass the time by making vigorous love inside the car, are suddenly interrupted by a stranger who seemingly appears out of nowhere. From this point, roadkill unfolds in a series of episodes that offer no linear narrative but rather seem to hover in an existential void, part surreal, part hallucinatory and often violently real. Within the loops and echoes of roadkill's clever construction, there are suggestions that the second man may even be the first alter ego. There's a lingering complicity between them that somehow always makes the woman seem vulnerable. The car itself, though it remains stationary, takes on a sinister personality of its own, like some inert yet threatening observer of what may or not be a murder, either actual or imagined. The performers are extraordinary, even when the material itself seems ready to run out of gas – or "petrol" as they call it down under. They hurl themselves in and over the car in virtuoso displays of physical daring, and the way Grayson Millwood creates an illusion of weightlessness inside the phone booth is breathtaking. In the end, what you make of it all, will depend on your susceptibility to roadkill's disturbingly incongruous and unexpected twists and turns and miasma of paranoia in which its characters seem suspended.’ Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 11 of 15 Performing Lines
Splintergroup - roadkill The Australian by Sharon Boughen 30 November 2007 Masterful Kaleidoscope of Realities In a Sinister Outback Brisbane Powerhouse SOMEWHERE in the outback, a car breaks down near a telephone booth. Car and telephone are the only two objects on stage and the action begins when a man and a woman wake up after a night's sleep in the car. Events unfold. Sarah-Jayne Howard, Grayson Millwood and Gavin Webber, three members of Splintergroup, have created a work that draws on keen observations of people's behaviour, and imagines what could have happened to a couple in this situation. Most intriguing is the creators' ability to manipulate time and space, shifting the audience's expectations and experience of each scene as it unfolds. roadkill presents multiple scenarios. There is the young couple (Webber and Howard) alone in the outback, flitting with each other, playfully kissing, making love on the back seat. Out of nowhere appears another man (Millwood), who knocks on the back window and scares the daylights out of the bouncing couple. Suddenly the sound shifts from outside the car to inside and the couple's fearful whispers and escalating panic. Millwood ominously offers to fix the car, but drives off. The whole scene is repeated, like Groundhog Day without the comedy. There are scenes of joyriding, car crashes, phone calls for help, endless possibilities. roadkill has no linear narrative. Scenes merge as characters move in and out of real time, and the dancers' physical strength becomes the focus. Their controlled, slow-motion duos play against fast-paced action as they crash on and over the car. Cleverly applied theatrical techniques shift the work from the mundane to the surreal. Mark Howett's lighting is stark and simple: sometimes just the slicing beam of the car's headlights or a torch. The sound design by Luke Smiles directs the audience's attention to either the emotional territory of the performers as it captures intimate moments, or to more general space through ambient noise. The dancers are phenomenal masters of their art and shift effortlessly from pedestrian movement to abstract dance and acrobatic sequences. roadkill is a kaleidoscope of shifting realities. It is distinctly Australian, exploring the malevolent underbelly of an often romanticised outback. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 12 of 15 Performing Lines
Splintergroup - roadkill Sydney Morning Herald by Jill Sykes 20 March 2009 Raft of Emotions in a Wordless Wonder Carriageworks, Sydney HOW many superlatives can you fit into one short review? This extraordinary dance work deserves them for its theatricality, choreography, performing skills and daring, sound, lighting - all combining to make this the best piece of dance as theatre seen in Sydney since Splintergroup was last here with lawn. Gavin Webber, Grayson Millwood and Sarah-Jayne Howard make roadkill a scary experience, evoking the great Australian loneliness as any young couple might encounter it by going out as far as the dirt tracks in an old car. The car won't start, the public phone doesn't work, the mobile is out of range, a decidedly menacing local turns up and it all becomes a nightmare. Or what you might hope is a bad dream rather than reality. It's very mysterious. Repetitions twist and turn in curious ways; long silences make your hair stand on end; loud music from the car radio contrast with gentle bush noises; car lights and torches cut through darkness; protagonists appear and disappear as if by magic: were they really there or did you imagine it? Without words, the dancer-choreographers convey an unusual range of emotions, moods and ideas through their incisive, often acrobatic body language. From flirtation, serious sex, fun, fear and aggression, they move to another level that in literary terms might be seen as magical realism - the sense of a world beyond the everyday. Film can achieve with ease but I have never seen it done so well in contemporary dance. While there is much to ignite the imagination through small details such as an association with the pulsing life in the earth all around - sensitively created by Luke Smiles’ sound design - there are also sequences of throbbing brutality. The car becomes a springboard for hurtling bodies and the two men have an odd, engrossing duet. There is so much more in this tight production by an outstanding team, including dramaturg Andrew Ross and lighting designer Mark Howett. The bad news is the season is ridiculously short: four nights. This is a thrilling example of what dance can do in the hands of exceptionally creative and resilient performers - I wish everyone could see it. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 13 of 15 Performing Lines
Splintergroup - roadkill Ballet.co.uk by Ann Williams 31 October 2007 Dance Umbrella Barbican Pit, London The car’s the star, or so it seemed for Splintergroup’s roadkill at the Barbican. Parked almost centre stage and taking up a lot of the performance space, it was large, red and sullen; it wasn’t going anywhere and it wanted to let you know that. After a slow start, roadkill proved to be a tense, almost cinematic piece of dance-theatre, partly thriller, partly a study of the destabilising effects of isolation. In the remote outback of Australia, a young couple are stranded in a broken down car miles from human habitation, their mobile ‘phone out of signal range and the nearby roadside telephone unusable. At first, they’re unafraid – they have water, after all, and they have each other. They play teasingly, they make energetic love in the car, a comic flurry of splayed legs and bobbing bottom glimpsed through the windscreen. Suddenly, menacingly, there’s a third person: a man is standing outside the car observing their activities. He tells them he can help them, get them out of there in no time, but alarm bells begin to ring when he also remarks that the girl is pretty. Thoughts of the notorious Falconio case, never far away anyway, now swim alarmingly to the surface (the girl calls her boyfriend 'Pete' at one stage). The three performers are Gavin Webber, Grayson Millwood and Sarah-Jayne Howard. There are no programme notes about them so it’s difficult to say if they are actors who can dance or dancers who can act; either way, they’re terrific movers, speedy, strong and fearless, and when the action hots up they certainly need to be. The ‘hotting-up’ business thickens the plot; things start to get mysterious. Is the second man real, or a figment of the couple’s imagination? Why do the pair fling objects at the car and apparently cause it to crash? Why do all three hurl their bodies repeatedly on to the bonnet and roof of the car? What is the significance of the stones that suddenly rain down on the trio? Why, in the middle of all the action, is there a tender, slow-motion pas-de-deux for the couple, where both seem to be reaching desperately to the skies? And, despite their casual hands-in-pockets stance, is there a hint of homoeroticism in the pas-de-deux for the two men? Do they have history too? Whilst I didn’t manage to unscramble the subtext of roadkill, I found the action totally gripping. Its effects were achieved with remarkable economy. The stage was unadorned, but the feel and sounds of the outback – especially the weird, unfamiliar birdsong - were admirably caught by Luke Smiles’ original music and sound design, which I assume also included the car’s roaring engine noise. This turned the jalopy alternately into something resembling the monster truck in Spielberg’s ‘Duel’, with its reigned-in power ready to deliver death and destruction, and occasionally into a juke-box blaring eerily out into the desert emptiness. Unsettling, but fascinating. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 14 of 15 Performing Lines
SELECTED REVIEW OF LAWN IN FULL Splintergroup - lawn Theatre Notes by Alison Croggon 17 March 2009 http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/dance-massive-lawn-rogue-untrained.html You know that things aren't working when it looks difficult, when those sentences still have hammer marks all over them. One of the hallmarks of ability is its invisibility, how it makes skill look like ease. Or so I reflected last week, watching the guys in Lawn lift each other with one hand as if they were made of paper. Goddam it, they made it look as if they were lifting balloons. They crawled up and down walls as if they were cockroaches. They threw themselves around the stage as if their bones were made of rubber. They stuck their heads in chairs and stayed there for what seemed like hours, and didn't suffocate. (Actually, that didn't look easy, it looked very uncomfortable). Afterwards, as they took their bows, you saw the sweat soaking their clothes. And by then you were so enchanted and moved by this extraordinary piece of dance theatre that all you could do was cheer. Lawn is a collaboration by three Australian men - Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood and Gavin Webber - that is about the relationships between three Australian men in a cold German winter. It was created in Berlin and expanded in their native Brisbane, and has toured internationally to enormous acclaim. And no wonder. This is deeply exciting dance, physically thrilling (and sometimes even distressing in the anxiety you feel for the performers), visually beautiful (an extraordinary collapsible set by Zoe Atkinson) and musically brilliant (Iain Grandage creating a collage of vastly differing styles of music, from achingly lovely cello solos to German heavy metal). Emotionally - well, emotionally it's all sorts of things. It's a passionate and unabashed exploration of masculinity - its aggression, its lostness, its danger, its tenderness, its hilarity - that makes you realise how exciting the smell of testosterone can be in the theatre. Through the physical language these men create, its wit and tension and brutality, emerges a profound tenderness, a lyrical delicacy and grace that is almost classical in its purity of movement. The dance begins with the absolutely mundane - one man brushing his teeth, another eating cereal, another vacuuming - in a grotty apartment with thin walls and dodgy pipes. But this mundane reality is full of cracks through which emerge the grotesque, the violent, the beautiful and the funny: cockroaches appear from nowhere and run down a dancer's arms, a wardrobe door opens to reveal a man playing a cello, or a man in lederhosen comes out and plays Waltzing Matilda on an accordion, which is one of the funniest things I've seen on stage. The final image - an extraordinarily moving evocation of homesickness - makes you gasp with its unexpected beauty. Cut Away Animal Farm Collective 15 of 15 Performing Lines
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