Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne.
19 August 2026.
We are, it seems, all obsessed with technology. Its uses, abuses. What it gives, what it threatens to strip away. To be fair, this is not new. Since the first stirrings of industrialisation in 18th century Europe, we have wondered what our machines might do to us. Liberate, enslave, replace, destroy?
Staged as part of Melbourne’s Now or Never festival, Chunky Move’s Time Remaining arrows, laser-like, into the anxious heart of the tech foment. What starts off looking like a blend of Baroque funerary ritual and 1970s arthouse cinema – dark and strange and psycho-sexual – soon morphs into forms more geometric. The fleshy and organic is overlaid, scanned, then reproduced as a flattened, tech-mediated data flow.
Indeed, the intersect of body and machine is amplified. Choreographer Antony Hamilton accentuates the meet-point. We hear the heavy clunk and crackle of lights on/lights off, of electrons fizzing in the wires. We see the dancers switch from soft flow to hard angle. We watch as laser beams frame a space, erect a cage, before shooting directly at their human targets. Soon, the lasers start their own dance, as though transcribing organic movement as a merely linear language.
Later, after a brief period of dancer rebellion – when the dazzle of lasers and the thick rumble of electronic music has reasserted dominance – the action is reduced to documentation. Multiple photographers emerge, and the performers are thus reimagined as representations of themselves. Captured, uploaded. Now, we understand, we are an archive, stored somewhere outside of ourselves.
Yet, for all that, it would be unfair to dismiss Time Remaining as cut/copy dystopia dreaming. Yes, the imagery is bleak and ominous, the soundscape relentless and foreboding, but there is something cyclical, iterative, about Hamilton’s musing on the theme. We have been here before, he hints, and we will likely return to a point not so dissimilar. Perhaps, in this world of machines, organic imprecision will remain. Amidst order, something messy we recognise as ourselves.
The other standout here, somewhat ironically, is the tech. The floating banks of lasers define the aesthetic of this work. They are its star. Their choreography is mesmerising. Lines and splatters of bright white light dancing in a dark cavernous ballroom. (I could not help but think of Plato’s cave allegory.)
Curiously, the phrase Time Remaining may itself be a clue, perhaps a sly joke. Our humanity is ephemeral. Life is a puff of air. The clock is ticking. But the machines, the data; how long will they remain? And do they need us to give them meaning?
Either way, what is clear is that Chunky Move have once more shown us how rich, how like fertile ground, the art of dance can be. If the dancing body is a piece of machinery, it may still be used for unpredictable ends, for outcomes that survive mere description.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
