venue: Temple Studio, Prahran
season: July 1999
choreography: Jo Lloyd
performers: Deanne Butterworth, Jo Lloyd, Hannah Panelli
music: Byron Scullin
lighting: Jo Lloyd
costume design: Shio Otani
photography: Rohan Young

A place for found objects. A place to be observed. A place of human behaviour. a place for interaction. A place of facts. An uncomfortable place. A place which becomes familiar. A place which contains three people. A place for dialogue. A place to capture evidence. A time capsule. A sample.

 

Review

Jonathan Marshall - Inpress - 4.8.99
This choreographic work from dance maker Jo Lloyd signals her emergence as an independent voice amongst the "Melbourne post-modernists" as exemplified by Shelley Lasica (who Lloyd has danced for) and Lucy Guerin (Heavy, Chunky Move's Body Parts). The sharp, angular, almost spiky geometry of Lasica's recent work (the Action or Situation pieces) is converted by Lloyd into more rounded, lyrical movement. Similarly, Lloyd shares wtih Guerin an interest in "atomising the body" - in sequentially articulating fragments of the body, running from elbow to finger in small stages. Guerin's work however is identified by a characteristic, almost hip-hop "bounce", a pneumatic, percussive springing of the body off-centre and then back again.

Thus Lloyd lacks the fierce, subdued energy of Guerin's chorography, producing movement which is at once more clinical in its detached execution, and more sensual in allowing the audience to simply soak up the dancer's experience of these movements without any other filtering element.

Watching work such as this is like peering through language and reality itself. Like the purist abstract painting of the 1920s and 30s (Malevich, Kandinsky), the total lack of any "meaning" the dancers' languid disinterest in expressing "emotion", creates a sense in which one comunes emotionally with precisely this absence of meaning. there is nothing going on here except hands and legs, colours and textures, backs brushing elbows in a way that is neither casual nor motivated. If one allows oneself to be captivated by this indeterminate lack of "content" (no small if), one can tip over into a realm where the texture of the dance, the way it teeters on the edge of communicating something without actually doing so, opens up a conceptual/emotional void, within which one's mind and emotion can play. It is like looking at a Magic Eye puzzle where what swims into view is your own response to the work. Lloyd and Lasica continue to push the envelope of his model of dance, which can transform your perception if, as with a Magic Eye puzzle, you are prepared to think intently about it until your eyes cross.