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Next Move returns to Chunky Move

Next Move returns to Chunky Move

By Mindy Gill

Chunky Move’s annual contemporary dance performance series ‘Next Move’ returns to Southbank this month with a world premiere double bill.

Next Move will present audiences with two distinct works, Remake and Mermerer, born from unique collaborations and a shared fascination for history embedded in people’s bodies.

As an initiative that nurtures the next generation of leading dance performers, Chunky Move artistic director Anouk van Dijk said each Next Move edition constantly changed shape and responded to the ideas and vision of the selected dancers.

“We are excited that in its ninth year, Next Move is a double bill of two very different duos who are each exploring conversations about dance, the body, excess and constraint,” Ms van Dijk said.

In Remake, dancer-choreographer-director Melanie Lane and ex-senior artist of the Australian Ballet Juliet Burnett draw on the physical archive embedded in a classical dancer and its displacement within a contemporary setting through narrative, space and technology.

“There’s this great divide between classical ballet and contemporary dance so this work is trying to look at converging the two and seeing what happens when they meet,” she said.

“It speaks about something greater than just looking at dance. It looks at our desire to preserve history while moving forward.”

Ms Lane said dance offered a performance language that allowed one to think about human existence in a physical context and was also an abstract experience offering more space for interpretation.

“I think a lot of the time it’s about offering or proposing questions for an audience to perhaps find their own answers themselves,” she said.

“In Remake, we’re working with the idea of drama – like love, death, loss and tragedy – that you can see in a lot of timeless classical stories such as Romeo and Juliet or Swan Lake.”

“We propose the audience re-contextualises these emotional states and, in so doing, attempts to open new doors into looking at what that drama evokes.”

The second piece of the evening focuses on three questions: If you were one of the last two humans on earth, what would you talk about? Who would you make art for? And what would it look like?

Created and performed by award-winning choreographer and dancer Jo Lloyd and theatre performer-director Nicola Gunn, Mermerer sees the artists maintain physical and verbal conversations simultaneously throughout the piece.

A cross-hatch of two platforms, it examines the notion of extinction and uncovers cultural constructs through the relationship between dance and the spoken word.

“The piece is isolated to two people who are entertaining each other rather than their audience,” Ms Lloyd said. “This territory of entertaining each other reminds me of camping. There’s this vast landscape of whoever you’re camping with.”

“You can have these philosophical conversations and then sometimes you go for an hour or so without speaking to each other.”

Ms Lloyd said Mermerer explored the “squirmy” side of relationships in an amplified version of how humans related and the resulting saturation between two people who were isolated.

And with the aim to physically and mentally stimulate, Ms Lloyd said she was looking to strike empathy in the audience.

Next Move 2016 will be showing at Chunky Move Studios between September 8 and 17 at 111 Sturt St, Southbank.

For bookings visit www.chunkymove.com

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