The Smoking Section

In case you were wondering what would happen to Chunky Move after the departure of founding father Gideon Obarzanek, the answer is that eight of their dancers have been captured and imprisoned in a smoke-filled glasshouse. Odd though that may sound, it is the brilliantly daring opening gambit of newly-installed Artistic Director Anouk van Dijk. Fresh from her native Netherlands and a career making dazzling, often site-specific contemporary dance work, van Dijk brings her particular vision to the Myer Music Bowl stage for the world premiere of An Act Of Now.

“It's very exciting for me to come to a country that has this very small amount of people living on this huge continent,” she begins. “That was a big thing that attracted me, because I come from a country where every single little piece of grass was designed by man.” Transplanting herself from a country of “sixteen million people in a space much smaller than Victoria” to the continental vastness of Australia has, in its own way, underlined the driving themes of An Act Of Now. “I've been fascinated by the idea of proximity for very many years now,” she explains. “I've done several works where space or confinement, or proximity or distance, were really important.”

Indeed, van Dijk's penchant for taking dance out of black boxes (to islands and dockyards) is well known. For her Chunky debut she wanted to show the work in the centre of the CBD, but OH&S regulations got in the way. A brainstorm with Melbourne Festival director Brett Sheehy landed the work at the Music Bowl. However, as a counterpoint to the venue's size, van Dijk will be confining her dancers to the aforementioned smoke-filled chamber and clamping headphones on the audience. “It's going to be a very extreme work. It's not going to be a sitting back and relaxing work. It's going to be full-on because the performers are in a very small space, six by six metres, for an hour. So, that's going to be some steamy experience.”

Both the masking of the smoke and the cocooning of the cans serve to create what van Dijk calls the “dance” between the abstract and the personalised. “With this piece I'm really working on a group dynamic, and how a mass can become individuals. What's interesting about the smoke is that it allows you to look at people in a more abstract way. But of course, as the smoke goes away people become more concrete, more real. They emerge from the fog. It's like when you're in the CBD and you black out individuals, you experience the mass. But if you see somebody in the crowd that you know, the veil is broken.”

Despite her many years creating work for her own Amsterdam-based company, van Dijk still wrestles with the age-old choreographic challenge of narrative; in other words, how to tell stories with such a non-literal form. “Life is non-narrative,” she concludes. “We just live our lives and it's only when you look back that you can tell stories. As you're living you're in constant response to what happens around you. I'm more interested in showing that kind of mechanism; and then it's easier to speak non-narratively because that's more like what actually happens.”

Sounds like an act of now.

WHEN & WHERE: Wednesday 17 October to Saturday 27, Melbourne Festival, Sidney Myer Music Bowl