Swift as wind. Supple as water. Grounded as surely as the summit of a mountain nimbly flits through fleeting clouds, and stays irrefutably present.
The spry air is charged, set alight by the fiery lightning that strikes from dancer to dancer and shoots through the audience.
The space between dancers is at once brimming with intercourse and fully, delectably pregnant: opening a boundless wellspring of infinite flow and limitless directions in which to move.
Each dancer is uniquely individual and simultaneously connected to each other as one.
At times deliciously interacting, intimately twirling and subtly spiralling one another, and at times breaking free to dance solo, each dancer faithful to their own deepest truth.
Such was the effect choreographer Cheng Tsung-lung created in his new work, Full Moon, debuted by the Sydney Dance Company at the Roslyn Packer Theatre on 13. 5.17.
Full Moon formed the first half of the S.D.C.’s new production titled Orb.
Cheng Tsung-lung’s creative team included Lim Giong, who composed the music; Fan Huai-chih, who designed the costumes; and Damien Cooper, who orchestrated the lighting.
The costumes inspirationally breathed into life “the mountain ridgelines, water ripples, rock particles, and moonlight shadows . . . [that] enriched my poetic imagination towards Full Moon, as if experiencing a ‘midsummer night’ illusion” Fan Huai-chih has explained.
Damien Cooper’s magical command of light, combining soft and hard light to allow for a huge range of depth and contrast, subtly and superbly lit the dancers as theycounterpoised motion and stillness, and offset featured tour-de-force soloists against the beautiful background of soft echoes created by supporting dancers holding the space for those in the foreground.
The “midsummer night illusion” of Full Moon was complemented and juxtaposed by the second half of Orb: a new work titled Ocho, choreographed by the S.D.C.’s artistic director, Rafael Bonachela.
Ocho is a gritty, tempestuous work in which the dancers confront and course through a socially made world contrived by human hands: an urban-scape at once built to accommodate but also to corral and constrain.
“A what point do we get stuck, how do we break out of and move through these spaces?” Bonachela has asked.
Ocho begins with each dancer asserting their uniqueness, and then each one exploring their own way of relating to the others and engaging together, sometimes in vivid confrontation, sometimes in an electric field of conjunction.
They dance like a champagne bottle shaken-up, ready to explode.
And then the eye of the tsunami consumes them and each dancer’s fierce individuality blends with each other’s virile lubriciousness. They are at once individual and yet collectively one.
Finally, to the haunting vocals of Rrawun Maymuri, they merge as if into a grounded serpent, resolved in mutual and harmonious synergy.
ORB played the Ros Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay between the 2nd and 13th May.