Bloodpaths and Orpheus

In a cultural landscape where “multidisciplinary” is often shorthand for vaguely related art forms co-existing politely, Brisbane Music Festival’s double bill bloodpaths and Orpheus proves the term can still mean something muscular, imaginative and deeply integrated. Across two richly contrasting halves, Artistic Director Alex Raineri and his collaborators offer a fiercely contemporary evening that sits somewhere between meditation, provocation and tectonic shift in how sound, movement and image can co author meaning.

The night begins simply. Raineri gives a brief spoken introduction, the lights fall, and bloodpaths emerges as a kind of ritual in the dark. On screen, Greg Harm’s videography, part documentary texture and part poetic abstraction, plays across the back wall of the black box studio. The work is built from a curated selection of eight pieces from the original 25 composer commission, each exploring identity, ancestry and belonging through a different lens. In practice, it becomes a choreomusical conversation between Raineri at the piano and dancer choreographer Katina Olsen (Wakka Wakka Kombumerri), whose presence grounds the project with remarkable clarity.

In Delve by Alex Pozniak, Raineri opens with sharply articulated low register staccatos, a series of deep, percussive attacks that suggest tectonic impulses rather than conventional lyricism. Olsen responds with choreography that drops toward the floor, her weight repeatedly giving in to gravity as if pulled by an ancestral force. She seems to move into the earth and return from it, an image that hints at a dust to dust cycle without ever stating it too plainly. Raineri’s use of stopped string harmonics creates a halo of fragile overtones around the more grounded bass material, so that the sound world mirrors the choreography’s interplay between density and dissolution.

The shift into We Have Become Kin by Cat Hope is almost confrontational. Raineri reaches inside the instrument and engages with its inner mechanics: scraping across the strings, plucking harmonics, drawing out grainy, fibrous textures that feel exposed and unresolved. The piano becomes a resonant object rather than a polite keyboard instrument. In response, Olsen’s choreography moves toward long lines and off axis balances, sustained leg lifts and slow returns to centre. Where the music disassembles, her movement reassembles, re negotiating equilibrium in real time. The dynamic between extended piano technique and physically searching choreography captures the tension in Hope’s thematic material, a sense of a shared future still under construction.

A later work, Orchid by Benjamin Marks, is marked by one of the most striking conceits of the evening. Raineri performs blindfolded, a deliberate surrender of visual control that invites a heightened emphasis on listening and responsiveness. Olsen uses body percussion, slapping thighs and stamping feet, to enter the soundscape as a live acoustic counterpoint. The two appear to react to each other as much as to any pre-existing structure, which gives the piece a volatile, improvisatory energy within a clearly defined frame. Choreographically, Olsen hovers at the edge of imbalance, rising onto the balls of her feet, pitching off centre, then catching herself at the last possible moment. When she finally crosses to the piano stool at the end and slams her hands into the keys, the gesture lands as both exasperation and reclamation. It is theatrically bold, but grounded in a clear emotional logic.

The central section of bloodpaths moves inward in scale and pace. In Music for a Memory by Jodie Rottle, Olsen begins prone on the floor, her body unfolding into seated and then reoriented positions in almost imperceptible increments. The choreography feels like a time lapse of memory itself, large shifts achieved through tiny initiations. Raineri anchors the piece with a recurring pitch, a single note that returns insistently while new tones begin to accumulate around it. Rain like textures and distant environmental sounds bleed into the piano’s resonance, turning the work into a meditation on duration and recall rather than a simple miniature. The slow, suspensive motion of the dancer and the patient development of the sound world invite the audience into an unusually reflective listening state.

Works such as Seated Backwards by Damien Ricketson and Scatter by Lachlan Skipworth build on this durational approach. At one point Olsen sits in a chair with her back to the audience, only her hair, neck, shoulders and arms visible. Small flexions of the spine and subtle rotations of the shoulders become choreographic events. On screen, Harm’s images sink into near monochrome, rich in chiaroscuro, while Raineri sustains long, almost singing bowl like frequencies that hover at the edge of audibility before blooming into more pronounced gestures. In Scatter, a delicate, repeated pattern functions as a kind of heartbeat underneath pointillistic piano figures and lo fi organ like drones. Olsen traces extended stretches and extensions using almost microscopic shifts of weight, so that the audience registers the outcome of the movement before fully understanding how it was achieved.

In moving pulse from the same matter by Jasmin Leung, the relationship between sound and image becomes even more abstract. The video treatment renders the dancer as a sketch like phantom, flickering in and out of legibility. The music alternates between lingering drones and textures that nod toward urban or industrial soundscapes, and high, bell-like timbres from a celesta. Olsen moves at an almost glacial tempo, as if inhabiting a liminal space between human and apparition. The sense of connected vibration that Leung describes in the program note finds a clear analogue in the way the choreography, the projection and the piano part feel inextricably entangled.

Images: Katina Olsen and Alex Raineri.