Dancehouse, Melbourne.
3 June 2026.
Apologies, dear reader, but this review will not be a review.
For the first two thirds of its near 50-minute run time, I did not ‘like’ Frankie. However, I was not invited to the opening night of its RISING festival run to click buttons on socials or give star ratings. Whatever you might think of so-called critics, two things are clear. Yes, my opinion is just that, and no more valid than yours. But no, these public opinions are not just personal taste in smart-sounding disguise.
To explain, even though Berlin-based dancemaker Martin Hansen’s solo work was leaving me cold, it was obvious that something thought-out and purposive was in play. His referencing of Frankenstein and his relating of the monster to the idea of grief may not, at first, have been apparent to me, but the piece clearly had an engine. There was a logic behind the ‘scrappy’ choreography and the use of voice as both percussion and occasional commentary.
Though I may have been underwhelmed, the auditorium appeared mostly engaged. If there was an in-joke happening, they were getting it and I was not. At points, I wondered what on earth they were laughing at.
But then…a moment. In a supermarket, buying pasta. Hansen’s dance+talk journey was revealing its unspoken heart. With a gesture, a briefly frozen moment – his hand outstretched, reaching for an imaginary item on a shelf that was not there – what had previously seemed merely indicative became real.
To confirm, what I mean by that is: real to me. I cannot, will not, speak for the rest of the room.
That I liked the remaining minutes of Frankie is perhaps as irrelevant as my not loving the first half hour. And maybe this is part of what Hansen intended. Grief is highly personal, however much it may unfold in relatively predictable stages. It is also, for the most part, invisible. We are routinely encouraged to get over it and move on. To some degree, we even pathologise it. Substitute grief for a range of other deep feeling, finely tuned states, and the social-cultural message is the same. Pretend you don’t feel/think/see things that way. Mourning, Frankie suggests, is tolerated at best. Like an illness. Or an ogre.
Fast forward to the work’s closing moments, and now I am moved. Hansen has dived through a veil of curtain upstage, as though swallowed. A gauze of smoke hangs in his place over the bare space. Now I get it. I am speechless.
Thus, as the crowd hoots and hollers with light-hearted acclaim and the artist takes his well-deserved bows, I am concussed. Did we just see the same thing?
Answer: of course not. And that’s just it. As a critic, I am always conscious that what I do is to practise a more deliberate form of seeing. That is what I am here for; not just to like or dislike, nor employ cliches to entice the PR machines to quote me in pressers.
Thank you, Martin Hansen. You have reminded me of this. So too have you, dear reader. I watch because I am being watched in turn. Look up, look beyond, look within. That might be Frankenstein in there. Which, by the way, would be okay.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
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