Mixed emotions as Kate Champion takes hybrid theatre further
KATE CHAMPION tackles the tricky issue of modern parenting in her new dance-theatre work, Never Did Me Any Harm.
KATE Champion was helping a friend prepare a pass-the-parcel game for a children's party.
"I went to wrap many layers [of paper] around one present and she said, 'No no, you've got to put a present under each layer.' "
Champion's hand flies to her heart, signalling her disbelief as she laughs and protests: "No! I think that's wrong!"
The straight-talking choreographer and director says of the modern, everyone-wins version of pass-the-parcel: "Obviously some parent hasn't coped with some kid's crying . . . it's boring for the kids, everyone sits around and everyone gets a present.
"I just think that in trying to protect, trying to produce the well-rounded child - I'm sure it's with good intent - but some things have gone so far that they cause harm in another way."
The pitfalls and challenges of contemporary child rearing is a subject that has preoccupied Champion, who is childless and 50, for the past couple of years.
It's the driving theme of Never Did Me Any Harm, her new dance-theatre work, which is being co-produced by Champion's company, Force Majeure, and Sydney Theatre Company for the Sydney and Adelaide festivals.
Never Did Me Any Harm is inspired by the The Slap, the Christos Tsiolkas bestseller-turned-miniseries that explores the far-reaching repercussions when a man hits a small, obnoxious child at a backyard barbecue.
"We're definitely not doing The Slap, it's just the springboard," stresses Champion, a fiercely independent artist who has specialised in category-defying dance theatre for the past decade. The choreographer and her Force Majeure collaborators will use interviews conducted with friends and strangers as the basis of the script for their latest work, an intriguing stir-fry of acting, movement, dialogue and recorded text.
In these interviews, ordinary people talk about 21st-century child-rearing dilemmas, from concerns about kids having no boundaries to overscheduling of children's lives. "I worry about children not being bored because I feel that in boredom I discovered imagination and time seemed to stretch out," reflects Champion, who is sunk in a funky, sculpted beanbag as she is being interviewed while wolfing down her lunch at Sydney's Wharf Theatre.
For her new show the choreographer is working with actors, dancers and STC's co-artistic director Andrew Upton, who is dramaturg. "Andrew is useful as an objective, outside eye," she says, explaining how the STC boss is overseeing the production's throughlines and narrative arc.
Never Did Me Any Harm is part of a growing -- and for some, an alarming -- trend in which theatre companies are increasingly programming contemporary dance and, in the process, blurring the boundaries between the two art forms. In early 2011 Sydney's Belvoir Theatre staged Human Interest Story by Melbourne choreographer Lucy Guerin. The show sold out but divided critics. Guerin will be back in 2012 at Belvoir with a new offering, Conversation Piece, which the company is promoting as a "mesmerising cultural encounter between two art forms".
Reviewers were bowled over, however, when British-based dance-theatre company DV8 premiered Can We Talk About This? in Sydney last August.
This provocative production used a synthesis of movement and commentary to ask hard questions about the West's often self-censoring approach to the excesses of multiculturalism (such as forced marriage) and Islamic extremism.
Stephen Page, Bangarra Dance Theatre's artistic director, recently co-created a dance-theatre work, Bloodland, for STC. It explores tensions in an Arnhem Land community caused by the collision of traditional and postmodern cultures and will be reprised at the Adelaide Festival in March and by Queensland Theatre Company. Dance and physical theatre have featured in recent programs at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre and, in a further sign the membrane between dance and theatre is thinning, from next year, STC is to employ Gideon Obarzanek -- one of the country's leading choreographers -- as an associate artist.
Champion believes cross-form productions enrich traditional art forms. "I would just say to the purists that they should have faith that pure theatre and pure dance will live on, it [dance theatre] is not a threat . . . I think that as an artist, it fuels creativity to go into the unknown and to push things." (Champion cast a disabled performer and an 80-year-old man in her critically acclaimed 2008 show The Age I'm In to challenge assumptions about what constitutes beautiful movement.)
Belvoir Theatre artistic director Ralph Myers says dance's expanding role in mainstream theatre is not surprising: "The work of contemporary choreographers and the theatre they make is not that different to the theatre that might be made in a company like Malthouse or Belvoir . . . Text is not a necessary component of making good theatre."
But Melbourne literary critic Peter Craven argues the trend is dangerous. Hybrid theatre, he says, ends up being mostly about dance. "I want theatre companies to be putting on plays . . . The idea of dance as something that supplants the theatre proper, I think, is utterly absurd. It is a dangerous trend to have a kind of progressivist theatre which is not particularly interested in the integrity of the dialogue."
Blogger and former theatre critic for The Australian Alison Croggon disagrees: "I think it's a healthy thing. It's just standard in Europe [where] the relationship between the different performing arts is taken for granted . . . What I am seeing in Melbourne is a lot of really interesting young writers emerging and they're very various." Many of these plays were well-written and highly theatrical -- the result, Croggon argues, of the open-ended approach adopted in cross-form productions.
Ironically, while the debate about dance theatre heats up, Champion -- who has been involved with professional dance since she was 16 -- wants to take her work in a new direction.
"I think we [Force Majeure] will enter a different phase after this work," she muses. "I think we might not revisit this level of theatre or dance theatre for a while." Why? "Well," she says pensively, "You don't want to repeat yourself . . . I guess it's [a case of] 'how do you shock yourself into a different challenge?' "
Never Did Me Any Harm opens in Sydney on January 11; Adelaide on March 14.