Review: Authorised Vintage 501
Molly McKenzie | No Vacancy Gallery, Wurundjeri Country | 10/2022.
A spectre is haunting Melbourne — the spectre of postmodernism.
I’m not the first to bastardise this oft-echoed line, and I’m certainly not the first to highlight the rich (yet arguably peculiar) relationship between our deep Southern city and one 20th-century New York dance scene.
It’s beyond the scope of this abridged review to explain the histories and historiographies that led Melbourne to this postmodern juncture, which I will call MelbPoMo for concision (and to be annoying), but other, more knowledgable authors have touched upon it elsewhere.
However, MelbPoMo is a connection worth reiterating, even here, as it continues to manifest in intriguing ways, with one example being Molly McKenzie’s new Fringe work, Authorised Vintage 501.
Authorised Vintage 501 belongs to a delicious oeuvre of emerging MelbPoMo makers. Yes, it's a punchy work of contemporary dance, performed with bite by the choreographer herself alongside Gemma Sattler, Samakshi Sidhu, Sarah Kosoof, and Valentina Emerald, to the club night concoctions of Liv Mirrington, but it's also a self-contained perspective on one of Melbourne’s prevailing choreographic stories: postmodernism.
Chic scarecrows, bedecked in patchwork denim — indigo, white, and black — glide across the polished concrete of No Vacancy gallery. Hands — flat and crooked from bent elbows — slap imaginary faces and sculpt a square vernacular.
The dancers crawl, fall, mince, wince, and pose in gestures borrowed from pedestrianism, as is the apparent style of MelbPoMo. Walking and tripping along their paths, the cast weave a grid of cotton—a denim horizon—that acts as their interface, their second skin and scaffold.
They build a plane of immanence, to borrow from Deleuze, that allows for a particular framing and then dismantling of the dance between present-day Melbourne and what I deem a New York imaginary: a speculative ‘inheritance’ that juxtaposes a rainy Judson night with the techno thrums of Brunswick.
The effect is, as it has been since the advent of minimalist sensibilities in postmodern dance, to make unremarkable the language of the remarkable; to ‘reduce’ the body. Even in more athletic sections, the dancers ‘disengage’ from their physicality, such that their presence imparts absence; a lack of pretence, mythology. We could be just like them, implies McKenzie, in our jeans and Salomon sneakers.
The cast summons energy, high and low, and reference fashion, high and low, too. The dancers evoke and embody a turning point in the pop-cultural postmodern: the infamous ‘double-denim’ of Britney Spears and long-time leech Justin Timberlake. To the calls of The Flower Duet from Lakmé, our double, triple, quadruple denim deconstructees tire themselves in pursuit of an ordinary moment: of something banal that might subvert our collective anxiety around our loss of purpose, as Justin’s chambray cowboy hat once did in 2001.
My sense is that we will continue to see MelbPoMo works in this vein from young artists like McKenzie, not least because of the influence of older members of our community, but because of this ongoing malaise.
Across the turn of the millennium, postmodernism weaselled its way out of the grand narratives that preoccupied Western thought. Though dance arrived at the postmodern party through a slightly different door, we share in this loss today, with the COVID-19 pandemic, climate crisis, and rising cost of living just three examples of our seemingly plotless lives.
McKenzie draws on that which exhausts, both physically and conceptually therein, and in doing so comes close to achieving what I find most intriguing about dance: an ending. I’m of the opinion that the strongest gestures of the body are obliterative, so call me biased, but the ending that McKenzie nears — a re-articulation of MelbPoMo through a Gen Z lens — is certainly attractive.
For an emerging choreographer and cast, this is a compelling and tight piece. Specific, modest in scope, and interrogative in its physicality, Authorised Vintage 501 gently kisses the bootcut edge of the imaginary and lets the spectre live on. Maybe there’s no point, but at least there will always be denim. ▮
