Export File

Straits Times 27 Jun 2000English

item doc

Chunky Move is not the dance klutz that its name suggests.

A youthful dynamo with stylish panache, the five-year-old Melbourne-based company delivered charged kicks and nifty swerves in its debut here.

The first of its double bill, All The Better To Eat You With, was a wicked new spin on the ol’ skool fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood.

Oblong aquariums with effervescent bubbles set an uncannily cool world against a narrative boiling with naughty perversions and pop psychology.

Lying naked, our heroine soon became the object of desire of a man-in-suit who turned out to be none other than a horny well-endowed wolf-in-disguise.

A zany chorus played forest characters, multiple grannies and psychological ciphers, as the dreamscape shifted from stock cartoon to campy sex-romp and rape.

In parodic irreverence, choreographer Gideon Obarzanek sent the nerdy granny into in a sexual death-tryst with the big bad wolf-cum-serial-granny-killer.

Meanwhile, flitting about as a healing angel, Little Red Riding Hood traded her wings for rape victim memories. In the background, a recorded voice wailed words of trauma.

Payback time came and she slayed the wolf with brutality. She could have eaten off his testicles in the final blow – but she proved too mild for that.

Such moral ambiguity and flippant pastiche made it generally hard for one to assess the seriousness of Obarzanek’s intent and themes.

One wished for extremity in the direction that it prompted and should have followed through. It was otherwise bubble-gum pantomime with indecisive over-the-top tendencies.

Where the first bill displayed Chunky Move’s acute dance physicality, C.O.R.R.U.P.T.E.D.2 allowed the full technical aplomb of the ensemble to reel in mayhem speed.

Departing from narration into abstraction, the millennial vision here is of a digital apocalypse where humanity is mediated and lobotomised by data overload.

Looming over the dancers was an oblique giant kite, a slow rotating white satellite onto which static screen buzz and scratchy video were projected.

An intriguing score by dancer Luke Smiles was an assault of vacuum hum, arcade-game noises and industrial-techno music with acid pound.

With similar infectious groove, the fevered sextet issued relentless and aggressive moves, jerking in rapid awkward turns. Their cyber-virused bodies appeared physically-handicapped, corrupted by technology as it were. The energetic furioso thus hurtled the 85-minute-long evening – and also the Singapore Arts Festival – into a conclusive high.

Judging from the applause for Chunky Move’s contemporary sense and idiom, the full-house audience seems ready, more so than one would think, for similar cutting-edge and more abstract dance from Europe today.

This year’s festival boasted an unprecedented and excellent dance curation. Difficult contemporary art – not entertainment – will continue to bring us relevant inspiration.