The Beginning of Nature

To a mostly live, powerful accompaniment composed by Brendan Woithe, played by the Zephyr Quartet, and sung by Karen Cummings and Heru Pinkasova, a troupe of nine dancers performed the world premiere in Canberra of The Beginning of Nature, the full-length (80-minute) version of a new work that patterns itself on various aspects of the natural world.

In its opening scene, the work packs in a good deal of intriguing, novel choreography.  Although the work shared with much other contemporary dance a distinct emotional neutrality and no apparent sense of progression, it contained clear suggestions of a great deal of insectile motion — amazing in the rapid muscular movement it demanded and in the inventiveness of its choreography — and occasional other animals.  Half a dozen dancers created the illusion of a caterpillar; a couple of emus stalked across the stage; and very complex choreography resulted in several fantastic illusions of metamorphosis.

Worth special mention is the production’s lighting design, by Damien Cooper.  It was cleverly done, an amazing sequence that often competed in power with the dancing itself — which was uniformly superb.  The visual gestalt might have seemed more integrated had costumery enhanced it, but that’s a minor nitpick.  A more significant compromise on the work's overall drama arose through repetition and subjective length.  Confining the performance to 50 minutes by minimising repetition would have maintained the surprising visual impact with which it set out.  But these are merely artistic options that can be played with as time goes by.  As a new work containing good elements of visual surprise, this is one worth seeing.

John P. Harvey