Heavy Lifting

You might think a forklift is an unusual addition to a contemporary dance work, but Kate Denborough, creative director at Kage, scoffs when asked if it's the oddest thing she's put on a stage. “No, not at all. We've had a taxidermy leopard. We've had Australia's most celebrated female bodybuilder. We've had all sorts of things. A forklift is just another in the line.”

The forklift in question is the central element and gives a title to Kage's latest show that will have its world premiere at Sydney Festival in January. But because of the danger involved in using a forklift onstage, Denborough says her dancers have had to do a little bit of extra preparation. “We had to get our forklift licences. A forklift license is called a 'licence to perform high risk work'. Everyone needs to be driving and doing and performing everything – it's totally self-sufficient.”

And right from the moment that Denborough first began thinking about the piece, the Melbourne-based choreographer has had to change the way she works. “When something's really exciting there's an adrenaline rush and you want to just try everything straight away. It's been a good lesson; we've had to calm down. It's been really good for me to be more methodical and analytic before going into the rehearsal room.”

Dancing on and around a moving forklift has also proven to be a challenge for the performers. “They're not in control. When performers are working with their own bodies they can push themselves because they can trust their own limitations, but when you're working with an object or a machine it's really different. Also, if you're on top of the forklift and someone else is driving it's really challenging to trust someone.”

But Denborough says a forklift, though at first glance an odd fit for a contemporary dance work, has a lot of benefits. “It's a fantastic machine theatrically because it's like a little moving stage. You can move it up and down, you can change the speed, the height. With the whole show the machine itself actually becomes quite a beautiful, graceful object. It takes you out of that perception of seeing it in a really noisy, outdoor, muddy work environment – a very masculine environment.”

Forklift is a show that is about playing with perception and contradiction, and the promotional photos taken for the work highlight the vulnerability of the performers. “There's something about it that looks kind of horrific in a way,” Denborough says. “It's like that thing where people say you always have to wear hard, steel-capped boots around a machine and then you see someone barefoot underneath the forklift – it gives the audience that real sense of danger and risk.”

WHAT: Forklift
WHEN & WHE\RE: 12 – 16 Feb, Arts Centre