Club Guy&Roni / Australasian Dance Collective: Bad Nature

Bad Nature is a feast for techies, but disappoints as a performative journey. Multidisciplinary artist Boris Ackett signs the impressive sound-and-light installation, a ‘constantly shifting landscape’ which effectively drives the show. A crane with a broad warm spotlight, for example, beautifully opens the show evoking a calm sunrise. Brought back as a sunset in the end (of course), it also becomes an Orwellian big brother for dancers and audiences alike – one of the strongest moments of the evening. Or take the carré of over fifty individual LED lights hanging over the stage: connected by a translucid and synthetic cloth, the spots repeatedly go up and down at different paces, evoking awe-inspiring images (the illuminated cloth presenting as a perfectly synchronised chorus of medusas), or adding to the drama as the performers submit to or rebel against them.

But beyond the technological feats and enticing sonic experience delivered live by the three percussionists of HIIT, Bad Nature doesn’t really take us anywhere. While signed by four makers of two different and well-established companies (Amy Hollingsworth and Jack Lister from Australasian Dance Collective, Roni Haver and Guy Weizman from Club Guy&Roni), the choreography is surprisingly monochromatic: the movement overall is flowing and elastic, then broken by expressive hiccups, resolving into flow again. The 12 dancers (6 from each company) are physically strong and capable, pleasing to look at as they blend together and transition from a group setting facing the audience to a duet, a solo, or a moment of spatial chaos. But it’s nothing new under the sun, and in their dancing the expressive layer feels overacted and without clear dramaturgical line: now appearing afraid to be touched, the dancers then mingle in tight embraces, only to shift again into a new front-facing formation just for our visual amusement.

‘Who truly holds the power – the human, nature itself, or the systems we have built?’ The big, Matrix-like questions mentioned in the programme ultimately feel like an excuse to put this overtly non-sustainable performance on display. And what for? A bit like Marie-Antoniette recreating Arcadia in the gardens of Versailles just before her world came to an end, in Bad Nature these two companies seem to use (a lot of) technology to deliver a softly dystopian landscape which fails to urge us to think beyond its clearly illustrated metaphors. ●