Animals of Distinction. The Holy Body Tattoo & Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Festival Theatre. 4 Mar 16
Take the monument from monumental, and you begin to gain some comprehension of the extraordinary achievement Holy Body Tattoo’s Monumental is as commentary on surviving life in the 21st Century.
Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras’s choreography, remounted by Sarah Williams for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, is one which ‘fractures’ the ensemble into separate units standing on block pedestals arranged in a sophisticated depth of field as to suggest an array of living statues.
The ensemble strike motions alike to singing in the round, then in unison. The total effect is like a sharp series of stop motion film images. Fight. Pain. Weariness. Resignation. Surge forward. Repeat.
The impact is mesmerising for its stark beauty buoyed on, and further empowered by, the soaring, majestic live score played by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, sitting on a raised stage, extreme upstage.
The surround sound power of the score, with lightest nuances of percussion audible over god-thunder bass and trilling violin embellishes the performance like a 24 carat white gold lie. One senses these human ‘statues’, and their stressed, strained, anger-edged poses, are in fact not ones of oppression or fear (of course they are) but statements of glorious heroism in the face stark odds.
To take the question to a greater depth, projected text by Jenny Holzer poses some very hard and dark observations on human life and interaction, which feed directly into a choreography as physically punishing as it is emotionally razor sharp.
Monumental effectively works to strip away any sense of ‘heroic strength’, by pushing the boundaries of what’s considered ‘heroic’. The ensemble members slowly but surely find themselves pushed off the pedestals, where they stood, onto the floor; then suddenly they are at war with each other.
Are you tough enough? Are you, monumental?
David O’Brien
When: 4 & 5 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
