Artery

Artery
Artistic Director Annie Greig
Ten Days on the Island
Launceston, Earl Arts Centre, 7 & 8 April

Each of us has a map we live by, an internal compass. The body has a territory.
It is this territory that is explored in Tasdance’s fresh new work, Artery, as part of Ten Days on the Island. Given the task to create a work based on a compass point, four emerging choreographers navigate us through their individual creative territories – and it is a fourfold journey of heart.


It is the artistic strength of ‘East’, by Trisha Dunn, that particularly captivates. ‘East’ is an exquisite, languorous meditation in movement, set to an ambient score that lulls us into and along with the transient beauty. The dancers drift and glide, sometimes in duos, sometimes apart, mesmerising with their languid gestures and soulful exploration. They are breath and tides, sunrises and sunsets, firefly and flower; nature with its temporal beauty, swept away in a poignant moment like a Buddhist sand painting.

The other three works are less mesmeric, but still have sublimely beguiling moments: in ‘North’, a male dancer creeps across the stage, sliding and undulating, a primitive organism mouthing a silent scream to the pounding techno music; in ‘South’, the dancers spontaneously re-costume into bathers in a delightful exhibition of childlike innocence and whimsical self-consciousness; in ‘West’, the four dancers move as one mystical goddess, all undulating arms and living vibration.

The body has a territory, the heart a map. Artery is innocent longing, irony, humour, evanescent splendour – the heart in motion. If the four directions symbolise the periods of a man’s life, then Artery is a geography of soul: four emerging choreographic talents who are orienting themselves as an iconic part of Australia’s contemporary dance landscape. We are privileged to witness it.

Wendy Newton