Arts House, Melbourne.
13 November 2024.
Sisyphus, Scheherazade, scrolling. It goes on…and on…and on. Always suspended between starting and ending. As if we were waiting for doomsday or a miracle fix. Thus, we are left restless, perhaps breathless; or maybe just exhausted. Pessimistic. The cliffhanger has become much more than a narrative device. Now it resembles a state of mind.
Prising our perpetual suspense apart, writer Holly Childs and dancer Angela Goh revel in the emerging cracks. Their absurdist vignette, Cliffhanger, hovers in a dreamlike realm, where time is reordered and story arcs are more like Mobius strips. Or, more pointedly, like the infinite scroll we have all fallen foul of.
Presented as a solo, Cliffhanger happens in a stripped back space, more white wall gallery than black box theatre. Here, Goh hovers, seeming frail and alone, with her phone and a few indoor rock climbing holds. She speaks and moves in broken clauses, shifting between repetitive/obsessive loops and time-passing tasks, as though she were a prisoner, or a madwoman. At one point, she seems to make a bid for escape, to climb up towards the light, but like Sisyphus she finds the task beyond her.
Strictly speaking, Cliffhanger is not straight ‘dance’. Being relatively text heavy, it scans as part theatre, part live installation, part performance poetry. That said, Goh articulates ideas both explicit and implicit with a palette of finely detailed movement. Although the work happens at a gentle pace, and has decidedly unchoreographic moments, her lines are exquisite. It may seem simple at first, but on closer inspection, the dance is one of precise, almost mechanistic precision.
Somehow, this helps to underscore Goh’s seeming vulnerability, as though she were being manipulated to the brink of distortion by an offstage force.
Amplifying this effect, Gediminas Žygus’ lush but warped cinematic soundscape. On occasions, it hints at warmth, promises easy melody, yet always it veers. It adds to the surreal tone of the work.
Likewise, Childs’ text hints but never resolves. At times, it feels like a sequence of shared posts; a kind of space-filling, algorithm-pleasing noise. Elsewhere, it coalesces, and ideas form more fully. Astutely, it resists full clarity, mimicking the bated breath of the cliffhanger episode end.
Taken whole, Cliffhanger has an incompleteness, intentional or otherwise. It refrains. Excises. There is a brittleness and porosity to the work, as though something of great value is tangible but not attainable. Indeed, you are left wanting to know more. One more ep. Another few minutes on the doomscroll. Or maybe we are simply waiting, like cultists, for a salvation that will not arrive; and was never seriously intended.
If Goh and Childs set out to craft a stripped back, dance analogue of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, they may well have succeeded; if only because we are left hanging. Looking up at make believe stars, yet still largely in the dark.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
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