BY MARK BOSCH, LEAD CRITIC
One Infinity
Sydney Festival
Carriageworks, 23 January
On Wednesday evening, I return to Carriageworks’ Bay 17 to see One Infinity, a music and dance collaboration between Chinese and Australian artists. The space has been transformed with two sets of tiered seating facing one another, and the stage furniture similarly mirrored. Damien Cooper and director Gideon Obarzanek’s set design alone provokes reflection, so to speak. As I sit down, I am thrown into the fundamentally affecting experience of facing another human being. Notwithstanding the low lighting or the perhaps 10- to 15-metre distance between counterparts, there’s an undeniable electricity radiating through the in-between space. It’s palpable enough to prompt me to sit up straight, breathe deeply, and feel a whole lot of emotions.
And One Infinity deals entirely in emotions. There’s no narrative or anything too heavily conceptual to digest, and while there’s a significant amount of audience participation (mostly, we were encouraged to mirror the hand movements of a seated dancer in each back row), it’s all in service of cultivating empathy, much like qigong seeks to cultivate life energy. Admittedly, the hand movements occasionally become just difficult enough to mirror that the slightest slip-up jolts me out of the collective trance. In fact, there seems to be an unavoidable humour to audience participation, and the accompanying giggles it provokes around the room feel in this case a little incongruous with the otherwise solemn, existential visual language of the rest of the work.
Or maybe that’s a bit morose of me. What kind of existence doesn’t include giggles?
Either way, when it comes to audience participation, you should always expect some amount of contingency.
I think we do well, otherwise. Two troupes of audience members waving their arms and hands about is pretty hypnotic, and although it can hardly be called a climax, the more rapid lighting that shifts to and from each half of the audience towards the end of the hour is frisson-inducing, approaching some-or-other epiphany of fellow feeling.
It’s extraordinarily fragile, though; due in part, no doubt, to an unfortunate technical issue that forces Obarzanek to halt the show less than 10 minutes in. One of the lights just won’t go down. Once it’s fixed, the disturbance continues to ripple out, and through the sparse melodies of the guqin, I can’t help my hyperawareness of every little noise, every little point of light in what should be a featureless, infinite room — only the exit signs excusable.
Nonetheless, the artists are outstanding. The three players of the Jun Tian Fang Music Ensemble, led by guqin virtuoso Wang Peng, are joined by recorder doyenne Genevieve Lacey. Four masterful players craft immaculate infinity pools in sonic form. Lacey makes herself all too scarce, however, contributing in only a minority of the pieces.
Meanwhile, the combined forces of Dancenorth and Beijing Dance Theatre are stunning to watch, starting out enrobed within each half of the audience and ending onstage in undergarments. What starts as a slow magnetic pull towards the centre becomes a heaving, centrifugal oneness, with bodies fanning out in same-but-different ways, evoking a superorganism of which we were all a part, for better or worse.
Feeling like I’m part of a superorganism is my favourite feeling of all. Thinking ecologically in this way, as part of the irreducible web of life, can offer us so much sincerity, solidarity and strength of purpose. One Infinity glimpses these offerings. At their heart, they are about embracing difference, not excluding it. The audience’s contribution to this work won’t ever be perfect — save that for the musicians and dancers themselves — and perhaps that is its most profound lesson.
Images supplied. Credit: Victor Frankowski.
