Ballroom, Melbourne.
October 3, 2024.
Love fruit. Love apples. No matter what you call it, the humble tomato is always vaguely sexy. However, the sight of three dancers writhing in a pool of red juice isn’t as erotic as you might think.
Speaking of Zhou Kuanyu’s playful third hand, tomatofar from original. As a meditation on desire, on the ontology of desire, it does not shy away from it. Yet it’s more than just explicit, placing sensuality firmly in the cultural crosshairs. This is human sexual desire and carnal desire, filtered through various orthodox ideas. When you think about this in the context of Zhou’s Taiwanese context, where sexual mores and gender expectations are more rigidly regulated than here in Australia, the audacity of this work is all the more impressive.
Combining dance, live cameras and a bucket of tomatoes, Chow and her cast (played by Ng Chi Wai and Zeng Zitao) use shock value, slapstick, erotic cabaret and technical excellence to get to the heart of the animal. The titular tomato is clearly an agent. Fruits, vegetables, rotten, ripe, etc. The skin is porous and can be easily punctured. The pulp is soft and easily pulped. Ends up mushy. Blood. Our desires are strong, but our flesh is weak.
In addition to its comic flourishes and teasing openness, tomato The choreography is precise. The dancers’ lines are often industrial–severely angled and sometimes painfully distorted. There are also moments of gymnastic timing and coordination. If it looks wild, it’s a highly polished castoff.
In fact, it is this juxtaposition that makes tomato So interesting. Even in the throes of desire, there is calm calculation. Artistic, but also political. Coupling is never entirely personal. It is mediated by the sharp eyes of family, culture and ideology. By extrapolating this into a spectacle—a dance—Chou turns the camera on us. Literally.
Yes, tomato Comes with a punchline, a reveal that ties it all together. The simplicity and power of this dramatic technique are not only pleasing to the eye but also powerfully emphasize the work’s internal logic.
Performed in Australia as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, tomato It’s an interesting reminder: normal (acceptable) is not monolithic. Our humanity may be shared and our desires universal, but we manage it in different ways. Yet the dancing body pierces the surface of cultural preference. Stripped of conceptual overlay, it moves with grace, power and vulnerability, and is beautiful to look at. Kind of like a plump red tomato.
Author: Paul Ransom Dance information.
