So Close Yet So Far

"The human body is the society,” says Anouk van Dijk. The Dutch-born, now Melbourne resident Artistic Director of Chunky Move is holding forth about the spine of ideas around which the company’s upcoming Melbourne Festival show Complexity Of Belonging is based.      

“In the end, all of this stuff is sensory,” she states. “It’s all about how I feel and it’s all connected directly to our bodies. Our bodies are the core of our belonging.”

It all makes sense within the context of the project that van Dijk is bringing to life in collaboration with German writer Falk Richter and nine local performers. Complexity Of Belonging is about how we find and create a sense of belonging in an increasingly digital and disjointed world. Indeed, the much discussed atomisation of society and the attendant collapse of community have inspired and informed the work; both personally and philosophically. “A lot of people I speak to in Australia say, ‘Yeah, that’s my life’,” van Dijk explains. “Skype, airports, long-distance relationships, working in one state but having a family in another, being a weekend parent; y’know, it’s not so exceptional anymore.”

Behind the Scenes of 'Complexity of Belonging' from Chunky Move on Vimeo.

For Complexity’s co-creators, Richter and van Dijk, the reality of this tech driven lifestyle is very close to home. As the latter notes, although she is from Amsterdam, she has an uncle in Japan, a brother moving to Singapore and new life here in Australia. “So my tribe is tiny and living all over the world,” she says.

The same, she reveals, is true for Berlin-based Richter; a busy, successful writer/director travelling and working wherever the commissions take him. “Falk and I always reflect upon our personal experiences when we’re devising a new work, and so for me, having recently moved to the other side of the world, the questions are: where do I belong, what happens to the people I belong to who are living far away from me now, and how does it affect my work?” However, far from doom-mongering, van Dijk suggests these newly emerging forms of society represent “an adventure” of sorts. “How do we form societies now?” she asks. “But also, how do we form relationships and what forms of relationships are there? Different partners, same sex, different religions? What are the implications of that and how do we build families from that?”

Although Complexity will be van Dijk and Richter’s fifth collaboration it will be their first in English and the first since van Dijk’s move down under in 2012. “Because Falk is a writer and I’m really interested in the emotional impact of words physically we work really well together.”

However, it is the notion of togetherness that lies at the heart of Complexity Of Belonging. “Falk and I feel it’s something really positive that we have all these options and ways of discovering new forms of being together. We have to re-calibrate our belonging; and we see that as something exciting and not as something depressing and suffocating because, in the end, it’s about ‘how can I be close to you and how can we connect?’.

Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, 
Melbourne Festival, 6 — 25 Oct