JUDE WALTON:
NO HOPE, NO REASON
Deutscher Brunswick Street,
Melbourne
JACKIE DUNN
review:
eyeline 17 summer 1991
To
write about the temporal is difficult. To speak of dance, the soul thinking
the body, is to use a language often ill-fitted to it. One encounters
perhaps, some of the same problems of choreography as the performers
themselves. To seek an understanding of No Hope, No Reason, Jude Walton's
recent performance is, Walton herself reminds us, to do so with love.
For love is curiosity, the want to know. And to understand, one has
to look with love.
This
work is not solely a dance piece: Jude Walton's work, here as always,
is a blending of many practices but a blending which always has the
sense that "all ideas rise like music from the physical".
(Guy Davenport, Ecologues).
Dance/movement,
complex slide projections (here in collaboration with Ian de Gruchy)
and music/text (the texts of John Barbour being set to music by Hartley
Newnham) are spun together. This formal compilation, this structural
layering, correlates directly to the ideas offered up by Walton. It
is a work of the contradictious contrariness of love, of its necessary
but incongruous presence in the bleak, cold world in which we live.
This is the story of love within the story of the city; the one creating
the other infinitely ... ceaselessly creating variations on the themes.
It
is in the opening solo from Shona Innes that this most basic dichotomy
between reason and sentiment emerges: feelings blunt our reason, reason
blunts our feelings. Love is what melds these paradoxical impulses ...
and tears them apart again. It is the ultimate paradox (giving and taking;
revealing-concealing; seeking-denying): the equivocal expression of
love.
Here,
Innes' body dis-locates itself-'splitting' along its central axis, an
arm and upper body reach out while hips and feet stick rock solid to
the floor, awkwardly; a turning away in, fear, to the dark, while hands
seek out the light. A tense and nervous body divided along the chasm
between pleasure and pain. Nearly-neurotic gestures, hopelessly ambiguous,
duplex in their apparent non-reason, moving in and out of the stark
shadows. A sort of chiaroscuro of desire and denial-a dance between
the black and the white, where the passion lies. Untrusting gestures
in a world of lost trust, where offers of love are taken back. What
we have here is communication breakdown; one critically examined by
Walton and the dancers through their rigorous use of image work/ideokinesis,
as well as by Newnham in his creation of a score coolly denying the
troubling message of its libretto.
Barbour's
text penetrates the score to form a three-part harmony of voices singing
an ironical Renaissance ode to love: "I ... like don't like love
not love don't love don't care don't care if I am not you are not interested
interested no interest remember don't remember if I do do you know don't
know now any more yes more no now I care I don't care about love ..."
(Barbour). The broken syntax, the punning punctuation are symptoms of
a form of paralalia, particular to lovers.
Blithely
ignoring the confusion of the signals they give voice to, these three
extraordinary singers in harmony create a single voice. By reaching
for such purity of tone, of pitch, their voices meld to one, analogous
to the work as a whole.
There
is a space between contradictory or harmonious gestures which reflects
the resonant traces of the two, creating a third. This third then becomes
the essential, the one voice, arrived at through the investigation of
space. For it is in space that all three elements seek and find their
place: the searching out acoustically, situating the voice; the searching
out of the images folding over the walls and floor before settling;
the searching out of bodies, of lovers, this slow patterning of many
menages a trois, a quatre, a deux, in space. The curiosity to know the spatial limits
forms a link-for once again, ft is that curiosity which seeks understanding:
love.
The
site to which this work is specific (yet unspecified), above Deutscher
Brunswick Street, used to be Frank's Stairway to Heaven, a pool hall
for the city's destitute. An image of a rainy night curls around the
walls, picking up the name in glitter still on the door and we can laugh
nervously at the posturings we have taken up in a place like this. Relationships
at breaking point, solitary nights without hope, without reason. A place
like the performance's own space, of "expectation and desire combined",
of a "hoping against hope: clinging to mere possibility'"
(Concise Oxford Dictionary (--hope). A place where one can no longer
believe in anything, but continues to, regardless.
These
dream writings of Barbour's are matched by de Gruchy's projections,
dreamlike in their simultaneous intensity and obscurity-walls of raindrops,
waterfalls, clouds, roses, layered and overlayed to create a breathless,
painful beauty. Piercingly pink roses, in turn pierced by a note so
pure it vibrates, resonates and wraps up the wall, sliding over the
images, adding yet another. A pitch so unsettling, It has the dual but
indivisible effect of the sublime: this is a note of chaos, standing
in for the unrepresentable, where there is no reconciliation between
feeling and understanding, between hope and reason. This cold city space
has been fired up, momentarily: has been sublimated.
Even
when we enter the space, we are seated on specialty made wooden crates;
objects which suggest the packaged protection of fragile things, things
of value, commodities. Objects whose function has been upturned. We
sit arranged in a staff-like arc, our bottoms on the symbol of economic
rationalisation: the J-curve. For this is the hopeless/hopeful, reasonless/over-reasoning
space of the contemporary city. The work ends with a complex choreographed
run up the stairs-feet running in the Underground-where all line up
singing "it isn't enough, it isn't enough".
"The
memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place". (Michel
de Gerteau), Oneric images, images of memory are captured on film -
our space is shifted outside to the tops of trees speeding by, viewed
from a child's backseat in a car; to a boat bobbing upside-down, stranded
the film's topsy-turvyness re-emphasising our isolation on the waters.
Up comes, the boat again, right side up, caught by Walton in an extraordinarily
evocative image. By reflecting the boat-image into a mirrored pool of
water, it continues to bob, until Walton as performer comes and makes
it ripple, then splashes the water and the boat implodes. We are shattered
by the casual gesture of a hand idly playing.
Shattered
because we're more than just looking on. Through the integrality and
the resonant linking of music, image and movement, Walton and her colleagues
draw us into this beautiful vortex. We fall into it as one of the dancers
earlier falls-in a fall constant and apparently never-ending: from what?
from grace? from the exhaustion of romantic games? from love? The text,
these words uttered are a defence against the fall into love. The image
of the fall works through the body in an endless, almost seamless expression
of our struggle against the seduction of the abyss. "I fall therefore
a chasm opens up beneath my feet. I am falling endlessly and therefore
the chasm is bottomless". (Bachelard, The Imaginary Falo
This
work is of the sublime, and I don't use the word without caution. For
it is a dual notion, the sublime. This one, this symbolic whole, is
a one made up of two, is the sensation of the sublime, confounding by
its duality: this work is cleverly seductive, beautiful but more than
that--we have pain with our pleasure. At the end of the piece, where
the images again grow cold, steel girders, black, white and grey, speak
of the desolation that is the city, the despair that.is the human, and
of the perverse optimism that is love.
JACKIE
DUNN
