Dancehouse, Melbourne.
3 October 2024.
Pomme d’amour. Love apple. Call it what you will, the humble tomato has always been vaguely sexy. Yet, the sight of three dancers writhing around in a pool of red juice is less erotic than you might think.
That said, Chou Kuan Jou’s saucy three hander, Tomato, is far from prim. As a meditation on lust, on the literal body of desire, it does not shirk. However, rather than being merely explicit, it places carnality firmly in the crosshairs of culture. This is human sexuality, sensuality, as filtered by the various prisms of orthodoxy. When you contemplate this in the context of Chou’s Taiwanese background, where sexual mores and the expectations around gender are more rigidly prescribed than here in Australia, the audacity of the work is even more impressive.
Combining dance, live camera and a tub of tomatoes, Chou and her cast, (Ng Chi Wai and Zito Tseng), utilise shock value, slapstick, erotic cabaret, and exceptional technique to delve into the animal core. The titular tomato is clearly a proxy. Fruit, veg, rotten, ripe, etcetera. A porous skin, easily punctured. The soft flesh, readily pulped. Ending in mush. Blood. Our desire is strong, our flesh weak.
Aside from its comic flourishes and teasing openness, Tomato is choreographically precise. The dancers’ lines are often industrial — severely angled and occasionally contorted in a manner that looks painful. There are also moments of gymnastic timing and coordination. If it looks wild, it is a highly polished abandon.
Indeed, it is this very juxtaposition that makes Tomato so interesting. Even in the throes of desire, there is a cool calculation. Artistic, but also political. Coupling is never entirely personal. It is mediated by family, culture and the ever-prurient eye of ideology. By extrapolating it into spectacle – dance – Chou turns the lens on us. Literally.
Yes, Tomato comes with a punchline, a reveal that brings it all together. The simplicity and power of this theatrical trick is not only a delight but a powerful underlining of the work’s inner logic.
Staged in Australia as part of Melbourne Fringe, Tomato is a juicy reminder that normal (acceptable) is not singular. Our humanity may be shared, our lust universal, but we police it in different ways. Yet, piercing the skin of cultural preference, is the dancing body. Strip out the conceptual overlay, and it moves with grace and power and fragility, and is beautiful to behold. Sort of like a plump red tomato.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
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