Torque Show with Michelle Ryan. 28 Oct 2015

 

Shiny bright and confident, sitting cross legged, a glass of white wine on a small round table beside her, dancer Michelle Ryan greets and chats to audience members as they take their seats.

 

Adrienne Chisholm’s traverse set ensures Ryan can turn left, then right as she waves and smiles while engaging in pleasantries. It’s as if she is in a bar, the audience being passers-by.

 

When all the chatter has died down, the lights dimmed, Ryan regales us with a tale describing the strange sensation of biting on a series of beer nuts, feeling as if each tooth in her mouth was falling out. She spies this man across the room she wants to meet. They wave. She’s sure she’s toothless. Nonetheless with a big smile, she rises herself to greet him as he approaches. She is unsteady.

She has multiple sclerosis.

 

So begins an evening in which Torque Show’s production aptly named Intimacy draws its audience into the evolving relationship between the man, dancer Vincent Crowley, and Ryan. Even more so, the relationship Ryan has within herself with her body; its expressive capacities as she has developed and moulded them anew.

 

Intimacy’s blend of song, provided by Lavender Vs Rose (Emma Bathgate, guitarist Simon Eszeky), and company devised text makes for an evening of fabulist story telling, magic and thought provoking audience interaction. It’s funny, it’s difficult, it’s borderline tragic. Yet always, it’s hitting your heart and pushing your mind.

 

The line between assisting someone physically in need, yet that person also being powerfully expressive in body, is extremely thin.

 

Torque Show’s Ingrid Weisfelt, who danced with Ryan during Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre era, has clearly worked with Ryan to create choreography that includes, without apology, the weakness M.S. inflicts; transforming it in movement to release its capacity for expressive, emotive power.

 

Crowley and Ryan’s duet across the floor is an extraordinary explosion of sheer beauty in which Crowley’s pure strength enhances Ryan’s deft feather light touches of clear technique, drenched in feeling. All this summoned from a few, trembling unsteady moments carefully expressed with remarkable ‘against the grain’ control.

 

There is much to ponder in this work. Rightly, as Weisfelt states in her production notes, not so much about disability, but the ability to connect as much in action as heart.

 

Intimacy won the 2015 Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance.

 

David O’Brien

 

When: 28 to 31 Oct

Where: The Space

Bookings: bass.net.au