Review: Love Lock and Forever & Ever at The Arts Centre

Review by Greg Gorton

Love Lock and Forever & Forever is the double bill offered by Sydney Dance Company as part of this year’s Rising Festival. While the two pieces might be performed by the same talented troupe, they offer a stark presentation of how different creative visions may land us in very different places.

Love Lock, described as a “folk dance of the future”, is a series of scenes filled with beauty for all the senses. Choreographer and primary creative Melanie Lane has put an emphasis on presenting the best technical visions of all involved, and highly prioritises aesthetic appeal. It opens with a singular dancer, moving gracefully through a carpet of fog, in a tree of rods that lift to reveal themselves as the downlights of the stage. The melodic score by Clark provides the easiest demarcation between scenes while dancers show off their stunning ability to use the physical form in controlled and exciting ways. 

Damien Cooper’s lighting design is colourful, with neon strip lighting, carefully positioned spots, and compelling transitions. This vibrant design often complements the equally eye-catching costumes by Akira Isogawa. It’s perhaps these costumes that most evoke emotion in me, as my mind attempts to relate them to both the history of dance but also the beautiful movement of nature. What part of this feeling is intended, I am unsure.

The dance choreography feels designed to most efficiently present the high skill of the performers. There is an incredible sense of timing here as each performer can offer their own little phrase in the far reaches of the stage, while clearly doing so co-ordinated with a completely different flavor of dance in the centre. While this may be frustrating for the audience member who isn’t clear where the focus should lie, it is something worth congratulating the dancers on.

This, of course, touches on the big issue I found in facing Love Lock. While you could not fault any single creative for their work, and even argue that their singular example might be the best in the festival, the show ended and I felt nothing.

At first I suspected it was the lack of narrative, but I’ve attended many a night where narrative was not neglected but simply found irrelevant. These can be highly enjoyable. However, in any production, or artwork, there must be something to hold one's interest, to make them think or to feel something. For me, this is the very definition of art. It could simply be the ignorance of someone not well-versed in dance (true of me, for sure), but I did walk away finding myself unfulfilled. The music was melodic but there was no rise and fall. The dancers moved with precision but did they with purpose?

Being two shows connected by only a short intermission, it is impossible not to compare Love Lock and Forever & Ever. If Love Lock was the complicated scales that proved one a master at the use of the piano, then Forever & Ever was Moonlight Sonata; a production that did not require so high a degree of skill, but offered up more as a whole.

Forever & Ever opens, like Love Lock, on a single dancer. Instead of a carpet of fog, there is a bare stage with a single torch and two wires that look a little like a trapeze hanging slightly off centre. Instead of melodic music, there is silence, which continues for minutes into the production. Only then does a beat begin, the same beat, at the same pace, for the rest of the night, only offered with different instruments, volumes, audio-distortions. Julian Hamilton’s changing music is far more subtle than Clark’s. Ben Cisterne’s lighting design is most definitely as complicated as Cooper’s, but stands out as being so closely aligned with the music - and the dancers.

And that seems to be the key difference. Forever & Ever may also live without narrative (I think?) but what it most definitely has is a clear vision, one that every creative understands. From Paula Levis’s costumes that involve dystopian sci-fi and nationalistic hooliganism to Antony Hamilton’s choreography that is constantly aware of and in communication with Hamilton’s score, this is a piece that is a whole. The company describes this piece as “Humanity glimpsed through dance-floor politics”, and I think the comparison of the two descriptions is apt - one looks at dance, the other looks at life.

If this sounds more praising of one and critical of another, you have me wrong. That I couldn’t connect with one is true, but without the information it provided me with, I doubt the other would have had such an impact. To know the pianist can play such complex scales to to be more aware of just how perfectly their playing of Moonlight Sonata is. Love Lock says “look how amazing we are”, and Forever & Ever says “and look how amazing we are together”. As a pair, the production is a brilliant education in the art of dance productions, a night filled with things to please the eye and ear, and a reminder that we can expect only the best from Sydney Dance Company and their artists at all times. I, for one, am convinced, and look forward to seeing them more often.

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