Thu 15 Jan: Mia Segal, Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio, and Hui-Hsin Lu

This image is divided into three parts. On the left, two people are embracing, with one suspended above and hanging downward, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, while the other stands below, wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans. In the centre, two people wearing all-white attire kneel closely together, one partly atop the other, looking sideways, on a rectangular white drape marked with abstract multicoloured lines. On the right, a blurred photo shows a group in uniform grey dresses standing in formation with their backs to the audience, arms raised overhead, while one figure stands off to the right, set apart with arms resting by her sides.

News Story

Mia Segal A Human Touch

Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio Collapsing Into The Equilibrium Line

Hui-Hsin Lu Follow Me!!

Already brief by design, this night of Resolution sees the cohort pare their work down further still. A strong thematic thread runs through the three, each confronting a timely issue imbued with its own sense of urgency: the instability of online followings; the transience of human connection; the looming climate catastrophe. And so, the artists splice their concise stage time into moments measured and deliberate, often resonant with expressive clarity.

Hui-Hsin Lu opens the triple bill with a ménage à trois set to a live quartet. The aptly titled FOLLOW ME!! features a camp scene of some old-time ball, in which performers insist on being followed both in the waltz and in their love games – the dominant Casanova, played by Lily Schroeder, juggles the other two, while the remaining dancer, insecure, vies for her attention, at times tellingly joining the quartet. Fifth-wheeling the ensemble performing Strauss and Offenbach is also the voice of James Shing Mu CHENG, awkwardly preaching to the rejected loner, articulating the scrutiny likely spiralling through their mind. FOLLOW ME!! emerges as a digestible metaphor for the anxiety of the online climate, unfolding through three mini acts that move away from clichéd ballet toward more serious contemporary before circling back to the ostensibly light-hearted quartet; the work may reach a humorous finale, but the scene grows increasingly unsettling, the dancers’ screams as they perform the can-can, for instance, transpiring less as delight than as fear.

Contrasting this extravagance is the subtlety of Mia Segal’s A Human Touch, which opens with a voiceover issuing an honest request to the audience: to hug their neighbour. This creates enough bustle for the dancers to enter the stage unnoticed, allowing the piece to begin in medias res with the two frozen in an embrace. The sound of a crowd chattering plays as the audience settles in – or is it drifting from the theatre bar? – and eventually ceases into silence, lingering on the emotion of the gesture. One of the dancers eventually melts away and falls under its intensity, setting into motion a series of sequences, each beginning with a prolonged embrace, a soft fall, and followed by shorter, beat-heavy phrases – including confident lifts and floorwork, often unisono – before returning to the opening formation. Gradually, the movements become faster, denser, and yet – more prominent, carrying the new energy of the embrace even as they reach ever more urgently toward it. At a most upbeat atmosphere, the dancers smile and run off abruptly, the audience left unsure whether the act is finished – a fitting conclusion to what has been an intelligent meditation on physical touch, its impact and necessity.

Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio’s Collapsing Into The Equilibrium Line addresses the climate struggle through the metonymy of melting glaciers – though still unanswered in its call to action, a discourse all too familiar, that awareness crystallising as Ludwig Berger’s composition of melting sounds gives way to news snippets punctuated by “surprised” gasps that verge on choking. Thus the ordinary set, composed of large sheets of paper, and Gauhe and DiMeglio themselves, dressed alike and a generation apart. Their message is nuanced, revealed by the intricacies of the performance, often, somewhat ironically, urgent and sharp – be it in the rapid collapses, the near-robotic sequences, or the precise folds of the paper itself, clearly the glaciers of this set (and, crucially, also the debris). They may try to repair the paper-glaciers, but the folds cannot be undone, and the tape they bring out is futile; they may attempt to catch one another in a series of repeating embraces and falls, as if borrowed from Segal, but the cycle is vicious. We are past the point of melting.

Olivia Wachowiak

Follow Me displays the trappings of a Baroque costume drama as three women rehearse elegant, balletic court dances, accompanied by a live quartet of professional musicians, plus a singer (James Shing Mu Cheng). However, despite the façade of etiquette and sophistication, the subtext is different: one of the women annoys her partner by endlessly falling over, a third dancer feels left out, makes faces off stage, then seeks company with the violinist. Soon discord, tiffs and romping chaos erupt. Choreographer Hui-Hsin Lu effectively weaves clowning with spirited pedestrian movements to create a light, entertaining interdisciplinary work that highlights the multifaceted talents of the dancers.

How long can you watch a couple enact an intimate embrace before feeling uncomfortable or touched? Dancers Amanda Pang and Caitlin Macleod linger long in such a position, cherishing the physical and emotional experience of holding and being held. They lean in and yield to each other; heads touch, cheeks graze, arms grip around torsos and gradually the couple melt into the floor. They establish trust and acts of surrender that continue in an impressively coordinated, weight-sharing Contact duet, where the pair balance, fall, catch and surf across their bodies’ surfaces. While their performance is risky and energetic, the powerful connection they maintain pays testament to choreographer Mia Segal’s searching questions around humanity and touch.

To finish, choreographer Greta Gauhe and visual artist Deborah DiMeglio explore the devasting reality of melting glaciers. These big dense bodies of ice are depicted as piles of large stiff sheets of crumpled white and pale blue paper into which the performers immerse themselves. The women wrap themselves up in the folds of the paper, collapse onto it or balance the engulfing sheets on their heads. At one point they engage in a duet of harsh pushing and resisting, their jaws clenched in effort. In another moment, they tussle with the paper, scrunching and ripping with the aim of destruction. Doomfully, the sound of dripping water and alarming news flashes accompanies their endeavours. Gauhe and DiMeglio’s moving embodiment of the glacier’s struggle for survival, before its watery collapse, is creative, topical and visually striking.


Jo Leask

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