The audience are active participants in a new work by Natalie Abbott, Janine Proost and Amelia McQueen, and from the beginning we are invited, coaxed and drawn into its making. Elevate demands that the performers stay with us constantly in the present while still achieving the structures around which the work is built.

Each audience member is led into the space where the three performers ask the question “What do you expect?” The glass walls of the gallery are soundproof, which allows the audience left waiting outside to observe everything taking place but remain unaware of the question until entering. Inside there is a sense that we are initiated into a collective understanding and follow the trio as they engage in improvised and continually re-imagined responses to each person’s ‘expectations’.

Understandably, there is apprehension for some in the audience, while others appear completely comfortable. There are also those who drop their guard without realising that they momentarily become the most enthralling performer present.

Once everyone has been brought into the space, the work continues through a number of experiences. This includes the trio being birthed through a glitter sheet, carrying audience members through the space, and undertaking a frenetic attempt to physically experience something akin to elevation in all possible manifestations. It takes time to move through the stages of the work but we are involved as more than just observers in many ways, which tempers a need to understand what’s happening. We are spoken to, lightly touched or held, asked to write, and then partnered with another audience member to speak and yell the words.

As each new relationship between audience and performers is negotiated, the boundaries of exchange become elastic, as no one holds complete control over the performance. All are invested and vulnerable in the same moment. Abbott, Proost and McQueen use their bodies, voices, costumes, the space, and each other to deal with this fluid territory, encompassing everything from literal to theatrical to inexplicable physicalised translations of the experience at hand.

When the trio exit the space at the conclusion of the work, they even give us an opportunity to share an audience-only connection. Standing in torchlight, we have been positioned into a circle linked by our outstretched arms. We become the individual remnants and collective heart of the performance and have the potential to realise our own experience of the final instructions to “Expand. Elevate.”

Abbott, Proost and McQueen are generous and sincere throughout the performance, which encourages the audience to be equally present, even if through confusion or hesitation. For one night only Elevate was like being inside a live and non-repeatable experiment where together we were simultaneously the content and the results.

Details: Elevate was performed at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, Gallery 4, on Wednesday March 19, 2014.

Bio: A VCA Dance graduate and 2013 ArtStart recipient, Kelly Beneforti performs, teaches and choreographs in diverse contexts across the country. Originally from Darwin, she continues to spend time in urban and remote parts of the Northern Territory, notably with Tracks Dance Company. Kelly also maintains professional relationships in Tasmania and Melbourne. In Canberra, Kelly participated in the Soft Landing program with QL2 and last year performed in No Place, an immersive installation work by independent artist Adelina Larsson. This is Kelly’s first experience in review writing, however, she was involved in You Are Here in 2013 as a performer.

Image by Lorna Sim

Presented at Canberra Museum and Gallery, the performance was viewed through the glass walls of Gallery 4, somewhat removing the audience from a sensorial experience of the moving bodies. This strengthens the sense that Kuzma and Lott are being propelled and sustained by the internal logic of their physicality.

Both performers are seamless dancers and the fluid, spiraling quality of their movement on the floor early in the work disguises its physical complexity and difficulty. The circular form of the movement also links to the first projected image, which resembles the shape of a biological cell.

Later, the vocabulary becomes angular and rhythmic in their bodies, which suggests a transition into the realm of the square. Kuzma and Lott are always satisfyingly detailed and precise, both when moving in and around, affecting each other and when moving in polished unison.

Throughout this first half, the work stays firmly with explicit explorations of the body’s capacity to move with circles, squares and the spectrum between. Still, the work’s opening image continues to resonate in the space: we saw the duo standing beside a projection of a blank square of white light, moving in a repetitive cycle of arm rotations that began in meditative slowness and gradually changed speed and pattern. Existing somewhere in an expressive state between absorption and resolve, Kuzma explains during the Q&A session that followed the show that this material generated a sensation closest to the awe that he felt when he watched a video that emulates the behaviour of the universe’s dark matter.

This same video is projected in the last part of the work while the two bodies stand in front of it in silence and stillness.

The arrival of the performers in final and sustained rest allows the accumulated energy of the work to gradually dissipate. The space is opened up for the audience to witness and experience the awe that Kuzma describes.

The concept behind this work provides the duo with compelling source material and their individual performances are engaging. Yet the work is contained and controlled in its majority. Even when the projection shows triangles being shifted and warped, Kuzma and Lott maintain their honed physicality and the feeling of restraint in their relationship to each other. Having created Square Nebula in only two weeks, a second stage of development would perhaps reveal further possibilities in what is already a strong and embodied work.

Details: Square Nebula was performed on Monday and Tuesday the 13th and 14th of March 2014 at the Canberra Museum and Gallery.

Bio: A VCA Dance graduate and 2013 ArtStart recipient, Kelly Beneforti performs, teaches and choreographs in diverse contexts across the country. Originally from Darwin, she continues to spend time in urban and remote parts of the Northern Territory, notably with Tracks Dance Company. Kelly also maintains professional relationships in Tasmania and Melbourne. In Canberra, Kelly participated in the Soft Landing program with QL2 and last year performed in No Place, an immersive installation work by independent artist Adelina Larsson. This is Kelly’s first experience in review writing, however, she was involved in You Are Here in 2013 as a performer.

Image by Adam Thomas

When was the last time you heard someone say the name ‘Joseph Gordon Levitt’? For the audience of ‘You Are Here versus Teen Make Outs’, it was Friday night at Lonsdale Street Roasters.

In a lively cocktail of storytelling and teenage nostalgia, four artists offer their musings on the thriving, gyrating melting pot that is the adolescent pop-culture industry.

Although the performers warn us to expect some ‘truly terrible stuff’, it’s clear we’re in safe hands as the sombre tones of Rosie Stevens’ cello plink out a medley of instantly recognisable teen pop hits (think MmmBop). We are now officially transported to a time when the words ‘quadrangle’ and ‘Dolly doctor’ featured heavily in daily conversation.

David Finnigan offers us a vociferously verbose summation of the evils of teen pop culture. Having discovered that it is a thirty-billion-dollar-a-year industry in Australia alone, he appeals to the crowd to invest in his plan: pluck a teen with star quality from their ho-hum existence, teach them how to be hot, how to be hip and how to be a star. A sort of sponsor-a-starlet syndicate. He coins the phrase ‘Long tail Lindsay’ to describe the drawn-out, public, slightly icky decline that will likely follow. Needless to say, many LOLs were had by all.

Jess Bellamy treats us to an imagining of her own tortured friendship with Taylor Swift after a fateful encounter in Nashville. In an attempt to teach Taylor to use her fame as a catalyst for change, Jess dispenses sage advice (if you see her out and about at the festival, ask her why ‘revolutions are like shopping for vibrators’). For this reviewer, the laugh-out-loudest moment of the night goes to Jess, for confessing that she listens to Kan Ye West’s ‘Touch the Sky’, to feel safe when walking alone at night.

Adam Hadley shares his treatment for a screenplay which may be best described as Groundhog Day meets Mean Girls… partially set in space. Compelling narrative and vajazzling references aside, I now have an insatiable desire to see Maggie Smith play a high school bully and say things like ‘Lost something, Ass Mouth?’

Teen Makeouts, despite the absence of a Harlem Shake reference, was a satisfying smorgasbord of teenage reverie. Don’t miss the chance to see these wordsmiths perform again throughout the festival and the year. You will totes LOL. For shiz.

Teen Make Outs was held on Friday March 14th as part of You Are Here festival in Canberra. To find out more about the festival, click here.