DISAFFECTED @ BLACKTOWN ARTS CENTRE

Disaffected2

Hope.  There must be hope.  Something we can do.

We’ve felt this way before.  In the 80s, when nuclear war was on our minds.  A dread and nameless undercurrent of an everpresent something beneath the everyday.  That fear that we would be engulfed.  With climate change, that sense of being swamped is real. The  peoples of the Pacific Islands, their lives, community and culture, is in our political and personal hands.

DISAFFECTED, in its world premiere, not so much shines a light on the environmental situation as it reflects light through the water that will overtake them.  Created from a concept by Katy Green Loughrey and devised by the performers, Ryuichi Fujimura, Valerie Berry and Latai Taumoepeau with Director Kim Vercoe, the production has been supported by and is performed at, Blacktown Arts Centre.  

Affecting and authoritative this is an immersive performance of symbols, movement and noise.  Yet it begins when the audience is plunged into darkness and silence.  Still sitting in black, the audio creeps in.  It’s a threat, an electronic ringing and vibration within which are the menacing undertones of an almost understood industrialised entity.  Then a quick hit of white light and we see the performers in statis.  Falling, floating, airborne yet tethered by lower limbs as they flail in slow motion: fighting an irresistible force.

Owing much to Butoh and Bodyweather, the movement of this piece ranges from these still and representative images to the rushed and rushing of violent sea and wind.  With blue tarps which can stretch across the large space, the cast can invoke tossed boats, shrinking islands and a massive, sweeping tsunami taking all before it.

But this is not just a dance piece, when the artists speak they touch and enthral, giving full capacity from their “heart to their outstretched arm”.  In the most delicately delivered sequence the audience is given the symbolic gift of the Miracle Palm tree which survived the 2011 Japanese Tsunami to stand as hope for a people devastated.  

The multiple symbols, body images, movements and shapings of the work are reinforced by recorded voices also.  Newscasts about climate change and Kyoto are counterpointed by personal stories and reflections.  The tarps themselves also become sound effects to travel the piece as do the corrugated iron sheets which appear.  These are both shelter and wind-hurled weapons.  And when they lean against the back wall with two of the artists huddled below, I was transported to that seminal work of the nuclear threat, Raymond Briggs graphic novel, ‘When the Wind Blows’. It became chilly in that space.

Yet the voiceover gives hope for the resilience of a people we are being led to appreciate.  How do they, each year, lose “house, pet animals, livelihood” even … lovers?  They have rituals like the shell money garland which will be exchanged for land one day or the creation of visual art with the charcoal of what has been burned and destroyed.  And the firewalk.

In this symbolic sequence, close to the end and before the news item about the withdrawing of the Carbon Tax, I found hope.  The power of positivity, the strength of belief will save a society engulfed and scattered like the little pieces of cooled fire she throws aloft.  But they need help.

DISAFFECTED is wonderful.  The work is a powerful and evocative performance but more than that, it is a call to arms.  Do.  Help.  Make the personal choices which affect the political issue of climate change.

Unfortunely the current season of the production ends today but there is also a video work companion piece AFFECTED which can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUbhyBDRg-I&feature=youtu.be

I defy you to experience either of these two works and remain unaffected.

Tags;  Ryuichi Fujimura, Valerie Berry, Latai Taumoepeau, Katy Green Loughrey, Disaffected, Affected, Blacktown Arts Centre