Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre, Melbourne.
18 August 2022.
Often times, the maker says it better than the watcher. “I think of my dance works as unfinished paintings of fragments, objects, writings, drawings, photographs and other creations. They are improvisational sites in which the constructed and the readymade are used to question our making of the world.”
Nebahat Erpolat’s note-to-creative-self fits well with the available evidence. Her slightly avant, slightly retro performance piece, The Conquest of the Garden, has both a warm intimacy and a cold, ascetic eye. It is poetic, angular, mosaic. Animal. Subversive. It unfolds in an episodic and cyclical fashion, interspersing action with stillness, always toying with itself as theatre, thereby prompting us to examine our own role in the spectacle of public storytelling.
Then, when we reference all that to the life and work of the famed Iranian feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad, upon whom Garden is centred, we understand even more profoundly the logic behind Erpolat’s consciously loose-limbed construction. Here, in dance, we see the fragmentary, speed-of-thought nuance of verse. Always we move in stanzas, compositing our various worlds in layers.
Yet, what stands out most is that a remarkable immediacy and intimacy, contrived or otherwise, emerges from the complexities of both poetry and movement. We are at close quarters with the four performers. They do not look like fantasy dancers or doomed poets; they look more like us. The scene feels almost domestic at times, like a gentle closeness has developed between us. They are in the garden, perhaps at the end of their day, and we are watching their private rituals pay out. Are we spying on them? Fetishising them? Who is conquering the garden now?
Watching it all, you sense deep echoes of mid-century stylistic and staging approaches, but you also see the aesthetic of digital modernity. A world revealed in slivers of light, like the pages of a book. If, at times, we are jump cutting and feeling fractured, at others we anchor to points deeper than dance theatre. When one of the dancers, (Victoria Chiu), lets loose a long and guttural cry it pushes our limits. How much pain will we quietly witness?
There is perhaps nothing new in Nebahat Erpolat’s Conquest of the Garden, but the point is that it does not matter. Old forms can make new shapes, even if you have seen those shapes before.
Yet for all the waffle, in Erpolat’s light touch choreographic garden the forms remain organic. This is certainly not a work of strict technical rigour. Here, the body’s language is a folk dialect, complete with soft, warm edges and easy fluidity.
Most likely there are far more literal and pointedly political perspectives on this work, so too more esoteric; if only because we find in Erpolat’s ‘improv feel’ an implicit invitation to range across a broad spectrum of potential readings. The poem is read anew by each reader.
In fact, the one thing you will find in this beguiling garden is room to move. (When you are sitting still, it’s sometimes all you need.) Thus, for all its tricky abruptness and seeming aloofness, The Conquest of the Garden is a welcoming and ultimately playful work. You just need to find your own way in.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
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