Mon Ma Mes (Revisite)

Mon Ma Mes (Revisite)
By Jack Ferver. Phillip Adams BalletLab. Temperance Hall – South Melbourne. 4th– 7th May, 2017.

Part Q&A, part lecture, part visceral dance, part theatrical; we end at the beginning.

Jack Ferver explores the notion between fictive and the real – is life purely a form of deconstruction? Why do we make personas to live by?  How do these in essence become truer than our real selves?

The audience and ‘selected guests’ become participants in Ferver's enigmatic performance.

In the black box space, the participants to stare at themselves, but receive their vision back through Ferver's unrelenting embodiment of the personas that he has adapted throughout the humorous, yet darkening corporeal stylized piece.

At the beginning, the selected guests are offered questions to put to Ferver, of which he responds to with mirth and sometimes desolation and despondency. These then lead into a physical manifestation of the answers (or are they really questions?).

Although we cannot just categorize this as a dance piece, it is more a narrative of studied movements that belie the manifestations of the physical and emotional constructs of the human psyche.

Mon Ma Mes (Revisite) straddles the boundaries of the participant’s comfort levels within the 45 minute performance. Looking back at the time spent with Ferver (because it truly felt individualised) it was so relatively short, yet strenuously long at the same time. His seemingly unassuming gestures were carefully choreographed as an honest narrative enactment of the constructs of façade that participants study along with Ferver.

We can physically hear the pain created through the movements, mimicking the strain that a dancer’s body is put through during a performance, but also the pain of having to keep a guise from slipping into our true identity.

Abstract gestures, impossible movements, and manifestations of emotional discourse create the distorted boundaries that Ferver is exploring and challenging the status-quo.

And here we end at the beginning.

Penelope Thomas

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