Dance Moves Of Light

When Paula van Beek answers the call she, alongside the rest of the Opal Vapour team, have just arrived in Brisbane from Mackay on tour. Despite the busy touring schedule – which will take the performance of music, light and dance from Perth to Cairns – van Beek sounds thrilled.

“Right from the beginning of making the work we really wanted to tour it and share it. A really special part of how we made the work is that we went to particular places and had residencies and worked in place so we're really excited about going back to those places with the finished work,” says van Beek.

The journey of Opal Vapour, across art forms and oceans, has been a long one. Director, choreographer and dancer Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal first met van Beek while both where undertaking postgraduate study at the Victorian College of the Arts. “We met on a residency project when we went up to Cape York, and after that experience we came back to Melbourne and we made a little eight-minute piece together and cemented our working relationship and our friendship and we've been working on projects together on and off for the last five or six years together,” van Beek recalls.

Inspired by the landscapes of the Indigenous land they were hosted on during that first residency in 2006, and by the works of artist John Wolseley, van Beek and Tunggal created Shadow & Ash. “It had an overhead projector, you know those old school ones you'd have at an old high school, we had that covered in earth and ash and I manipulated the earth and ash on the surface of the light and then Jade danced in the shadows and we had scores to trace and discover, so using performance-making language and dance-based, tasked-based practices we made this piece together,' van Beek recalls.

When Tunggal was offered a commission to create Opal Vapour, she immediately recruited van Beek, alongside Ria Soemardjo for music composition and performance, and the opportunity to fully realise the ideas in Shadow & Ash arrived for van Beek, who was tasked once again with the performance's lighting, but also the audio visuals and set design.

“When Jade was offered the commissions and she asked me do I want to be involved, I said, 'You know what, I've always wanted to make it so you could dance on top of the overhead projector, how can we do that?' For me that's been the big seed for making this piece,” van Beek reveals. “It's the first time I've touched those two elements within my own practice, so the set concept came out of 'How can we make Jade dance on a lightbox?'”

Heavily influenced by Wayang Kulit, a form of Javanese shadow puppetry studied during one of the residencies that developed Opal Vapour, van Beek says the performance embodies the traditional meditative elements.

“The Wayang Kulit is performed as a cleansing ritual, and the audience very much get that experience when they come to the show. It is a little bit like coming to a meditation and having a chance just to sit and watch and listen and experience and come away feeling clean and light.”