It’s outside along the ex-industrial wharf that is home to Sydney Dance Company (and Sydney Festival’s Thirsty Mile festival hub) where we first see performer Sandrine Lescourant (aka Mufasa) stumble out of the boot of an old, beat-up car. The back window is patched together with a garbage bag; the driver, Max (Maxime Jerry Fraisse), has a sporty swag about him as a dance track booms from his car radio. The music is heavy on featured samples, with lines of poetry like “I am flesh, I am flesh” cut over modern synth-based dance music.
Mufasa sizes up the audience, begins popping, falling, and writhing fluidly around on the concrete. At some point she realises that her self-expression is exposing, and begins to put on a masculine mask, mimicking Max’s stance and nonchalance. Is this the performative masculinity that patriarchy has created? The double bill presented by Sydney Festival is unafraid to play into gender stereotypes to make a statement.
Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus (Hope Hunt) is Belfast-born choreographer Oona Doherty’s 2016 masterpiece on the cages of masculinity. The poignancy of Doherty’s work is in the way she projects the male middle class experience on a woman’s body, and incorporates modern urban dance styles with contemporary movement. Performer Mufasa beautifully embodies the hyper-masculine caricature that males are forced into. Her control of physical and facial expression is mesmerising, graceful and heartfelt with and without the aid of the stylised, focused lighting and meticulously crafted music. There is great depth and meaning to be found here, as the piece transitions into a religious reckoning – “Wake up!” she says.
Where Oona Doherty’s Hope Hunt uses dance as a mechanism to show the impact of the patriarchy on working-class men, Emma Harrison takes a more aesthetic approach in the world premiere of Wolverine. The piece utilises three acts to explore the female form as wolverine. The dance components in acts Two and Three are evocative and visually stunning, produced with ethereal lighting – but the overall piece plays more as performance art than the “dance” that audiences might be expecting. With four pedestal fans as co-performers, and an ironic interlude of Billie Holiday’s ‘Blue Moon’ between acts, it’s unclear if Harrison is mocking the stereotype of women as wolves whose moods change with their cycle, or she just takes herself very seriously. On opening night this needed clarity, but it’s a piece that has the potential to evolve into something great.
There is room for both metaphorical and aesthetic styles in Australia’s choreographic cannon, and this is a rare opportunity to see these styles side by side. Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus is worth the ticket price alone – if I were you, I’d snap one up to see it before it ships back to Europe.
Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus / Wolverine plays in the Neilson Studio at Sydney Dance Company as part of Sydney Festival from Jan 10-13, 2024. Tickets are $49+bf and you can snap them up over here.
