Adelaide Fringe Festival
venue: Ausdance Studios Adelaide
season: March 16-19 2006

Melbourne Fringe Festival
venue: Lucy Guerin Inc. Studio
season: March 29 - April 2 2006

choreography: Jo Lloyd
performers: Sarah Cartwright, Alison Currie, Ana Grosse
music: Sascha Budimski, Duane Morrison, Byron Scullin
costume design: Shio Otani
Lighting design: Juha Vanhakartano

Not As Others was a commission from the three Adelaide-based dancers who performed the piece. Taking a raw and personal view into the private lives of its three characters, Not As Others reveals what happens when the individual is isolated from the group - exposing human instincts and defence mechanisms.

Review

Rose Mulready, Dance Australia June/July 06

Not as Others shows off Jo Lloyd's formidable talent for uncovering the squirmy side of human relations. Unusually, she was commissinoed to make this work by the three dancers who perform it - a novel solution to the contemporary dance scene's dwinding resources.

The piece is set on a patch-worked mat made of painted lino and old letters. It begins with a superbly conceived and executed bit of tension involving a bunch of carrots (flung and spat by one girl to another, who gobbles them down in a subservient frenzy). This master/slave dynamic, vivdly expressed by the dancers' eyes as much as anything, is interrupted by a third girl who dances anxiously by herself, but eventually seems to have her own cruel agenda. Lloyd wheels her figures around in rushes of aggression and passion which fall every now and then into unison (an uneasy kind of marching together, a synchronised touching together of the fingers). The dynamic of the master and the slave is complicated; the master needs her slave so badly that she is enslaved herself, and there is an odd tender moment when the two communicate in a kind of delicate sign language, their hands scrubbing across their clavicles, before being interrupted by the third girl, who coldly forces her body between them. During various struggles for power, the top dog position proves fluid, and the "master" girl, initially so haughty and magnificent, must jockey breathlessly. The "slave" girl makes a disturbing descent into a paroxysm of shaking and flinging.

The perfomers - Sarah Cartwright, Alison Currie and Ana Grosse, all from Adelaide - are remarkable, infusing these nameless battles with a sense of strain and menace.