PillowNotes: Chunky Move

Who is Dave and why is he so tense? Over the course of an evening with Chunky Move’s performance of Tense Dave, we come to understand a lot about Dave and perhaps even a little more about the things that not only bring Dave to the point of crisis but some of the intrigues and realities that fray our own nerves and whisper for our attention. The title of the work does not suggest a night of concert dance of a familiar style or story; this is not Tense Albrecht or Conflicted Siegfried. It’s Dave, and Dave may be just like us.

Similarly, the name of the company, Chunky Move, doesn’t instantly suggest grace and beauty. In standard fare, dance is more typically offered to us in portions of somewhat smaller size; not great lumps, but a morsel here or dollop there But this is robust work, powerful and solid. It gives us something meaty and substantive on which to chew, long after we have left the table.

Chunky Move hails from Australia and their name embraces the scale of the continent, the rigor of the outback, the renegade nature of a former British colony. Australia is a mass of independence with a constantly shifting identity. And so is this dance company. Founded in 1995 by Gideon Obarzanek, the company explores what contemporary dance means – on stage, in site-specific works, and with the incorporation of new media in installations.

Traditional categorizations of dance genres don’t seem to hold up when looking at the history of Chunky Move’s productions. To create Wanted: Ballet for a Contemporary Democracy (2002), Chunky Move sent surveys to more than 2800 members of the Australian public asking what it was they wanted to see in a dance work. One doesn’t characteristically associate notions of democracy with ballet. A historically elite form of art, made by great masters like George Balanchine left to the people? Terrifying to imagine what the riffraff might suggest. Other works test the boundaries between audience and performer by placing the two groups only inches apart (Three’s a Crowd, 2003) or give the audience a chance to choreograph on the spot with interactive technologies (Closer, 2002). What Chunky Move’s works appear to share is a fascination with our comfort and their own.

In Tense Dave (2003), Chunky Move again interferes with boundaries. This time it’s not the limits between the dancers and the audience that we see crossed, rather what is often hidden between people, even in close proximity. What is meant for public display and what is assumed will be unseen. Behind the walls of our apartments, we assume that no one watches us as we lie in bed, tinker with the piano, stew in an armchair, or wait for the telephone to ring. In our private lives, we oftentimes simultaneously long for our solitude and for human connections. Tense Dave explores that conflict.

Nearly fifty years before Obarzanek collaborated with choreographer Lucy Guerin and theater director Michael Kantor on the psychological, fragmented journey of Tense Dave, choreographer Anna Sokolow explored isolation in city life in Rooms (1955). Where Sokolow’s work represents the separation the inhabitants of a big city by placing each dancer in a wooden chair in different areas of the stage, Chunky Move places the dancers if not literally on top of each other, then at the very least crammed up next to one another. On an elevated, rotating stage, five characters languish and fidget in their own tiny rooms.

The rich blend of dance and theater in this work takes elements from each discipline. Disembodied voices suggest dramatic happenings while the movement vocabulary, sometimes gestural and sometimes athletic, is never merely decorative. When two women do a kind of pedestrian solo waltz in unison, we feel their isolation although they appear to have something in common. Similarly, when two men toss each other around and support one another, the feeling for us is more than merely kinesthetic satisfaction. We understand that the men’s relationship is built through this interaction.

Obarzanek commented in an interview about his work:

“It is quite a combination of abstract, more formalist work – but very physical. Bits of character and narrative slip in. One kind tends to undermine the other, but somehow that can actually be a good thing.”

This undermining for good effect certainly happens in Tense Dave. Each of the characters seems to participate in a compelling story, but we don’t quite understand it. We know that Dave has transgressed a boundary when he steps out of the spinning isolation of his little room and enters into each of the other rooms. That transgression escalates as the walls get taken down, readjusted, and built up again in other formations. The characters come under our scrutiny not because they have deliberately moved downstage center and clamored for the spotlight, but instead because some wheel of fortune displays them to us.

Guerin remarked about the practical aspect of the spinning stage when she said:

“With theater and dance, the angle from which we view something is crucial. One angle tells you everything. Another tells you nothing.”

Such a pragmatic outlook exposes the very humanness of this work. A shift in perspective makes the unusual familiar, the normal foreign. Ultimately, the spinning stage serves as a metaphor for the ways in which we too can feel out of control. When we wish we could stop the world and get off.

“Obarzanek has said, “I do have an interest in what is not traditionally the idea of beautiful. What I find beautiful is when the body is off-balance, at the point of collision or has saved itself from some kind of accident.” In my father’s house, there are indeed many rooms. ”

PillowNotesMaura KeefeAugust 1, 2005