venue: The Open Stage, University of Melbourne
season: October 2001 - Melbourne Fringe Festival
choreography: Jo Lloyd
performers: Deanne Butterworth, Mia, Hollingworth, Jo Lloyd
music: Byron Scullin
costume and set design: Shio Otani
lighting design: Richard Morrod
photography: Rohan Young

From transit lounge to emergency arrivals, the lives of three women briefly intersect as their journey becomes a passage through airports and hospitals to a departure from life itself. hospitalsandairports was a full-length work funded by an Australia Council Emerging Choreographers grant. It was performed in a combined installation/theatre space with slide projections and surround sound.
 

Review

Rose Mulready - Inpress magazine
You are "checked in" to Jo Lloyd's hospitalsandairports by two sleek blondes who look like flight attendants, but strap hospital bands on to your wrist. The stage is reached through dangling oxygen masks and carbolic soaps set out like runway lights. The smell of these soaps lingers disturbingly in the air during the performance. There are three dancers and three projection screens hovering overhead that project Rohan Young's photographs of departure terninals, crash procedure diagrams, and scattered limbs in white hospital clothing.

The three dancers, Deanne Butterworth, Mia Hollingworth and Jo Lloyd, play characters called Maud, Christine and Holly, whose personalities are established by voiceovers of them describing themselves, by photographs which capture them going about their daily business and observing the contents of the suitcases they've packed for their respective journeys. The layered soundscape created by Byron Scullin suggests an airport with its muttered coversations, blank muzak and muffled announcements.

The three women embark on their journeys and the scene is set for an intriguing correlation of airports and hospitals as limbo spaces where identity leaches away. The women carefully shuck their clothing, leaving it behind in body-shaped piles, and go behind screens to change into simple white shifts.

The contained, obsessively repeated choreography stretches into wide-armed flight. The scene soon morphs into a hospital, where the movement suggests measurement, incision and the abandonment of consciousness. There are moments in hospitalsandairports where the dancing becomes overpowered by light boxes, projections and props; there is often too much to look at, and the piece may have worked better if it had been pared back to give the three powerful performers a greater part of the audience's attention. But this is a quibble. Jo Lloyd and her collaborators have come up with a fascinating environment that sets off a host of associations and reflections.