Rewards for the Tribe opens at Melbourne’s Rising festival

Ritual and geometry come into play in a collaboration between Chunky Move and Adelaide’s Restless Dance Theatre.

A scene from Rewards for the Tribe, featuring dancers from Chunky Move and Restless Dance Theatre. Picture: Jeff Busby

As winter’s icy chill descended on Melbourne, Rising, the successor to White Night and the Melbourne International Arts Festival, made its third attempt at a successful debut, after Covid derailed the 2020 and 2021 seasons.

Under joint direction of Hannah Fox and Chunky Move’s founder, Gideon Obarzanek, Rising 2022 has an eclectic contemporary dance program, with an inclusive mix of local creators, Indigenous artists and international contributors.

Much of Antony Hamilton’s tenure as Chunky Move artistic director has been disrupted by the pandemic, so the unveiling of his Rising contribution, Rewards for the Tribe, is significant for the company and for Melbourne’s contemporary dance community.

Indicative of Hamilton’s creative approach, this work a collaboration with South Australian dance theatre company, Restless, which draws together artists with and without disability.

Such co-production is also well suited to Hamilton’s practice, which has long anchored itself in dance as ritual.

Chunky Move and Restless Dance Theatre at the Rising festival. Picture: Jeff Busby

The work’s central conceit is the interaction between dancers and mystical geometries that, at times, are elegant, co-ordinated and articulate and, elsewhere, are obstructive, disjunctive and dominating of both movement and physical expression.

Critical to this exploration is a series of portable Mondrianesque set elements in vibrant primary hues, designed by Jonathon Oxlade: cylindrical wands, a globe affixed to a pole, a trio of lozenges, regular and irregular stepped forms, and an outline cube.

A large, domed oval form, covered with a rock pattern and a smiling face on the base, completes the miscellany of forms.

The dancers’ black costumes are contrasted with colourful beanies, oversized coats, splashes of fur and dip-dyed hair.

The set elements plunge and dangle from swaying fly-system ropes, are shuffled, sorted and stacked, and are used as mechanical contraptions to bounce upon, hammer, pulse, and contort.

Heightening this interaction between form and function, the cube and some of the dangling elements conceal microphones, which amplify the sound of purposeful collisions and guttural vocalisations.

The primal throb, mythic tableaus and cathartic arcs that have echoed through Hamilton’s oeuvre appear immediately.

A naked figure, upstage and facing away from the audience, with silver tresses falling to the floor and holding a staff, heralds an opening sequence in which a spiky geometric element falls upon, punctures and awakens a recumbent Benjamin Hancock with an emblematic jolt. Hancock seizes and swings the projectile and, in a partnership with Restless dancer Jianna Georgiou, burbles away in a shamanistic tongue of grunts, hums and inchoate consonants.

From here, the trajectory alternates through contrasting vignettes of static and slow-moving scenes in which dancers and objects meld into clean sculptural forms.

A scene from Rewards for the Tribe. Picture: Jeff Busby

Too much posing and solemn, neoclassical placement would become tedious but Hamilton balances chiselled pronouncements with plastic, chaotic and often playfully “imperfect” movement chains.

In one such sequence, the outline cube confines Hancock and Cody Lavery as they restlessly slice the air and smack the frame with high kicks and slashing arms, while the Restless trio of Georgiou, Michael Hodyl and Charlie Wilkins oversee and give a sense of conjuring this clunky symphony.

Later, the geometric elements are bounced and carried centre stage, where they coalesce into a human pinball formation, in which Hancock and Lavery ricochet, flex, deflect props pounded against them by Hodyl and Wilkins, and lurch about as though hit by bursts of electric current.

As ever, Hamilton’s vision relies heavily on closely integrated lighting and sound to establish mood, and Jenny Hector and Aviva Endean, respectively, deliver those elements brilliantly.

Endean’s score is particularly remarkable, circling through delicate and diverse sound palettes that, refreshingly, depart from contemporary dance’s ubiquitous, industrial throb and pulse templates.

Rewards for the Tribe. Concept and choreography by Antony Hamilton. Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, June 1.Tickets: $45-$50. Bookings: online. Duration: 65min. Until June 5.