Review: Dancenorth Australia’s RED is the best thing to come out of Townsville since the Cowboys

It’s the show that set the Brisbane Festival alight and this North Queensland production is so good our reviewer would travel interstate to see it.

DanceNorth performers Nelson Earl and Marlo Benjamin inside the giant bubble in their production RED, on this week at Brisbane Festival. Picture Lachie Millard

Okay first the bad news. You missed it. This time around at least.

Dancenorth Australia’s show RED closed at Brisbane Festival last night after a short but memorable run. I caught it, you missed it but the good news is that this extraordinary piece of theatre will go on and on … and on. It deserves to.

It is already programmed for the Darwin Festival (I would fly to Darwin to see it again) and for Ten Days on The Island in Tassie and the co-creator Kyle Page (he created it with his life and artistic partner Amber Haines) tells me that HOTA on the Gold Coast is interested. And I did see some folks from QPAC there on Sunday night so maybe it would warrant a little season there sometime soon? Just saying.

Ranga’s rule in Dancenorth Australia’s RED.

Page tells me that there has also been interest from Europe and North American presenters for their 2022 and 2023 season too.

The show debuted in Townsville, Dancenorth Australia’s hometown and this company is the best thing to come out of Townsville since the North Queensland Cowboys as far as I am concerned. It did start a season at Rising in Melbourne in May before it was rudely interrupted by the pandemic.

The Brisbane season, made possible by Brisbane Festival artistic director Louise Bezzina who has championed this work nationally, has been a triumph and it has been the talk of the festival this past week. We turned up to see it in the festival’s warehouse space at Northshore, Hamilton and the queue stretched all the way to the river. It was a full house and the show got a standing ovation.

Dancenorth performers Nelson Earl and Marlo Benjamin inside the giant bubble in their production RED, on this week at Brisbane Festival. Picture Lachie Millard

I stayed seated mainly because I was just so blown away.

My wife, who knows more about dance than I do, whispered to me, as the applause continued, that this is the sort of show that could make a company. I agreed. Not that Dancenorth Australia isn’t already made. But RED will take it global.

How to say what it’s about when it is about everything? The program notes tell me this.

“Tens of thousands of years ago a genetic mutation gave rise to the physical manifestation of red hair in humans. Now, like many, they are endangered.

Air is slowly emptying from a large inflatable structure, ultimately sealing its inhabitants in preserved isolation. Time is running out.”

It’s a relatively spare work … just the figures inside the big bubble moving to a haunting soundscape created by Alisdair Macindoe and featuring music by Ellen Arkbro and vocals by Sara Black.

Dancenorth Australia’s Kyle Page and Amber Haines have created a work for the ages with RED

Haines and Page have created a work that is at once poetic, an existential crisis in movement, a cri de coeur that reverberates inside this enclosed world. Marlo Benjamin and Nelson Earl are the performers and they are brilliant and by the end they lay everything bare and I mean that literally. A spoiler alert is not really required for that because it has been all over social media.

It’s as much a performance art piece as it is dance and the experience of seeing it is like being at a good old fashioned “happening”. John and Yoko would have dug it.

It is at once epic and intimate. Dancenorth Australia uses the plight of its dancers as an allegory for a contracting world, a world where biodiversity is progressively being suffocated and silenced. It’s a daring gambit and a brilliant one.

I have never seen anything like this. Nobody has. Brisbane Festival could have run this show for another two weeks and it would have sold out every night.

It’s remarkable, brilliant and just 45 minutes long. It’s like a 45 minute long visual poem or a 45 minute long moving sculpture.

I don’t know what else to say except that you should keep an eye on Dancenorth Australia’s website to find out where and when it will next be performed. And when it goes abroad this will put Queensland on the map.

I drove home stunned with a song playing over and over in my head. It was Split Enz of course. “I see red, I see red, I see red …”

Indeed I did.

dancenorth.com.au