Immigration Museum, Melbourne.
June 5, 2024.
The thing about beauty is that it can be a tyrant at times, just as desire and pain are often complicit. Anthony Hamilton’s new work Chunky Move, Your beautiful, hover near the intersection. Like a yin-yang pas de deux, it crushes the sinister and the romantic, compresses the past and the future, and adds an animalistic edge to the formal. We watched and moved between them. Dance as always, with love and cruelty.
Seductive ambiguity is nothing new in modern dance, but Your beautiful Amplify this through clever use of space. First, the vast space of the Immigration Museum’s long room (with all its Victorian neoclassical pomp), and second, the confines of an inflatable “tent” resembling an ice cave. In every ritual, elegance always implies evil, power always implies corruption, ecstasy always implies madness.
In addition to the tango concept, Hamilton and his creative team created an aesthetic that recalls the more dramatic elements of the film. Think Kubrick and Greenaway. Add a hint of Jodorowsky and add a hint of Sorrentino’s baroque flair. There’s also something sci-fi about this work, in that it seems to take place in a world a lot like ours… but it’s not. Perhaps it is this slight mismatch that gives the work its intriguing texture.
In this combination, Hamilton forgoes understated choreography. It’s neither flashy nor showy, but there are moments of precision and gestural grace. The best details are small and sometimes just flicker. This helps emphasize the intimacy of the show, especially in the inflatable cave.
For dancers Samakshi Sidhu and Enzo Nazario, the challenge is to move with flexible intention, dancing in an ambiguous space where tenderness and mutual attraction can be confused with the desire for dominance. Although the action palette is unspectacular, the overall performance is rigorous and performed with appropriate intensity and discipline.
Surrounding it all is a cleverly restrained production, with lighting and other tricks never being overused. It blends sparse geometric architecture with mollusk-like organic forms, shifting us between ancient, modern and future in a way that enhances the playful (confrontation?) duality present in the performance and direction.
Performing for small audiences – up to 40 people – Your beautiful Both intimate and distant. Is this a love letter or a cunningly disguised act of empire? Or, more subtly, an exploration of metaphor, of the human instinct to create art, and to represent our world and ourselves in beautiful images on cave walls and ancient museum halls?
Author: Paul Ransom Dance information.
