Review: Rewards for the Tribe
Antony Hamilton for Chunky Move & Restless Dance Theatre | Chunky Move, Boon Wurrung & Wurundjeri Country | 06/2022.
Somewhere in our collective unconscious, Dali’s Crucifixion is being ridden like a rocking horse.
Antony Hamilton, through the elastic efforts of Chunky Move and Restless Dance Theatre, is perhaps the first to bring this dream to life in Rewards for the Tribe, a new work for Melbourne’s Rising Festival. This is a bright and intriguing piece for five dancers and a chorus of soft, colourful shapes.
As the work begins, three figures provide a sparse framing, while a small tab lifts and lowers. Two stand guard near a sweeping white curtain that cloaks the upstage. Further down, a supine little worm. A slender form in foam, clasped by a carabiner, descends from the rig and kisses the body lying centre stage. Joined by another, the creature rises to wander, circling as they both gurgle into the shape’s concealed microphone: a flaccid maypole.
The visual spectacle of Rewards is central to its gravity. Hamilton and designer Jonathon Oxlade reference Mondrian, but the set and costuming also evoke Picasso’s cubist collaboration with Léonide Massine for the Ballets Russes. The set/props carry the 16-bit charm of a Sega Genesis game, and these vibrant, kitschy shapes seem straight out of Sonic the Hedgehog’s Green Hill Zone. Steps, rods, orbs, and a large “9” shaped cushion upholstered with an off-brand Shania Twain. Later, a skeletal cube wiggles seductively, like gelatine.
The vocabulary is (sometimes unwittingly) disconnected and oblique. Legs split and splay into gymnastic straddles and extensions, while hands gently wipe faces with careful attention. Punches and kicks are thrown with Tekken-esque vigour. Feet curl backward into dog-legged leans. Dancers and props alike endure thrashing blows; sudden, exploratory violence. Repetition is used frequently to suggest monotony and ritual.
Midway the dancers are sprayed with rapid blasts of Jenny Hector’s masterful light; peppered with red, green, and blue. I’m reminded of small-town bars, and publicans thrilled by their new combination laser/dry ice machines. The dancers vibrate. The effect imparts, as it did on the sticky dance floor of my youth, an interruption. Our tribe has been spotted from above, their rhythms and routines ruffled.
Rewards at times reads like an ethnographic study: we are watching a documentary from an alternate dimension. The central tab lifts like an interstitial card to reveal a curious assemblage of bodies and tools and relationships. The curtain drops. The curtain lifts. A new study, a new scene, and new insights. Moreover, and for whatever reason, I am enchanted by the idea that this work could be set in a Westfield (indulge me). Imagine a mall at the beginning of time. A sprawling banality of white linoleum, home to a playground of myth. A group of estranged friends congregate in an atrium. They are frustrated from being dragged around, and then they’re giggling with one another and sharing moments of intimacy. We are voyeurs unto the everyday lives of an unknown community.
The vaguely religious iconography that bookends the work is intriguing, and Jungian in its appeal to the primeval. In both opening and closing, a figure faces away from us, flat like a hieroglyph. Their hair — the silvery purple of a post-bleach conditioner — rests at the edge of their buttocks. They straddle either side of an imaginary fissure and hold a thin staff aloft: a lightning rod joining heaven and earth. An ancient sage, a god. One could read further into the Jungian aspects of Rewards — the use of draconic shadow, avatars of apparent wisdom and naivety, rites of initiation and union — and ask if Hamilton is playing with our unconscious, often essentialist accounts of humanity. In a work that alludes to the “universal” idea of image-making, this seems likely.
Universalism can be a bit of a dirty word in some circles, and this isn’t without good reason. Universalism posits that some things are universally true without exception. In philosophy, universalist accounts of human behaviour and culture tend to minimise difference and ambiguity, and in so-called Australia, this intersects with colonialist notions of truth, validity, and “civil” society.
With this in mind, there is an appeal to seeing a “universal” work of dance at this COVID-shaped juncture. Though I hesitate to call Rewards for the Tribe a “post” pandemic work, it hints at a more hopeful future.
For me, no matter how idealistic, it is nice to occasionally feel like we are sharing experiences; that we are not actually alienated and fractured into countless, often lonely relativities.
Rewards for the Tribe is a work of levity and sincerity in equal measure. Despite some issues with editing and choreographic rationale, the strength of this work is its joyful intention to create something shared. Rewards is unquestionably rewarding, therein: a post-lockdown, psychoanalytic lollipop.
On my way home after the show, I was struck by how timely it felt. Crossing the Princes Bridge (hoping, in vain, that a lover might suggest I stay at theirs rather than take the train back to the hills) Robin Fox’s MONOCHORD pierced the mist below. The green light flitted like a hummingbird: a different kind of lover staying the night over Birrarung.
Melbourne is slowly moving again, and Rewards is testament to this nascent choreography. Like the dancers, perhaps we too are en route to a fabled Westfield by laser light — to a society learning what it means to be together again. ▮
