Union Theatre, Melbourne.
1 November 2024.
As a language, mathematics is universal. Beautiful and brutal, its truths as unforgiving as its mystery. Perhaps we can say something similar about dance. The language of the moving body is as ubiquitous as it is inexact.
Watching the eight dancers bring Chunky Move AD Antony Hamilton’s vision to life, I wanted to join in. I could feel Alisdair Macindoe’s metronomic score impelling me, like the ticking of time, to move. Respond.
Here then, the central magic of 4/4. Although inspired by mathematics, and shaped by complex counts, it retains an element of the primal and emotive. For all its abstraction and austerity, it thuds with a pulse not unlike that of our hearts. Indeed, the bare staging makes the bloody more obvious. In a world of pristine numbers, we are still red in tooth and claw.
Choreographically, Hamilton revisits his early years in the street dance scene. However, this is hip hop through a prism of contemporary. The angular punctuations remain, as does the athleticism. Iconic breaking moves are reconfigured, grafted onto the more sinuous body of classically informed dance.
As if sensing the street/studio splice could only go so far, Hamilton morphs the work into darker territory. What begins as a refined ‘battle’ evolves into something resembling ritual, as if the gang grew up to become acolytes in a Pythagorean mystery cult. Or black shirted fascists co-opted by the Dear Leader. Heroic monumental gestures abound. The rationalist regime, with its unquestioning faith in maths and science, (and perhaps a little eugenics), will teach us all to speak the new universal language. Don’t you wanna join in?
Both choreography and concept are shown in stark relief. The staging is Brutalist, stripped of decoration. The sound design is super-dry. Beats and bleeps and scrawl. And all draped in lighting that is at once mathematical and organic. Rothko canvases, psychedelic swirls, and stadium spectacle.
4/4 is high energy and intense. It has rigour, yet is not entirely robotic. The cold progression is interrupted, timings deliberately skewed. Amidst order, grit and chaos. The result is entrancing.
Yet, as the company prepares to take the work on a six week European tour, and the accolades continue to pour in, the true heartbeat of 4/4 may well have been revealed. Is this Hamilton’s subtle way of confessing to a kind of capture? Folk forms being sanitised for bourgeois audiences. Our need for belonging channelled by those who would divide. The cosmic wonder of mathematics being leveraged as a means of reducing everything to number. Who, we are asked, is captive, and who is making an artform out of catching?
Gosh, what a beautiful language dance is. It still lets us read how we choose.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
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