venue: Dancehouse - Bodyworks Festival
season: March 2002
choreography: Jo Lloyd
performer: Jo Lloyd
music: Rohan Young and Duane Morrison
costume design: Shio Otani
photography: Rohan Young

Frank is the neighbour; known only as a solitary, reserved and houseproud old man. Only within the confines of his home does he reveal the truth of his life, as he is tormented by loss of his wife and the uncertainty of his recollections about her death.

 

Review

Dance Austalia -
Jo Lloyd, whose solo, frank, cemented her growing reputation as a dance maker and performer of rare intelligence. The piece concerns an elderly man whose paranoid anxieties are controlled under the eyes of his neighbours, but erupt in the privacy of his home. Shio Otani's design is simple and clever, consisting of a long strip of flooring that changes from astroturf to carpet to linoleum. The audience clusters around it, implicated in the voyeurism of the suburbs. The movement from the precise alignments and floating hands of the public "Frank" , to the quiverings, whirlings and snappings of his private demons, was beautifully observed and performed. The brevity of the piece guarded its ideas and gestures agianst dilution.