Title:
On echoes, good dancing and earworms
Author:
Isabella Hone-Saunders
Date:
13.06.24

Dancehouse Season 1

Flesh Vessel by Jayden Lewis Wall and Melissa Yvonne Pham
Echo by Thomas Woodman

Arguably, to dance is to echo. Though oftentimes this descriptor is reserved for the sonic realm. It is a useful term for dance. An echo, a shadow, a reflection, a repetition… “repeat after me.”

That’s how you learn to dance. Using a mirror that reflects another body back to yours, you mimic these sets of shapes closely. And then you get better at it. And then you learn to do this in a synchronised way, a rhythmic way, a fast and then controlled way. And then you can rely on memory and periphery. With the echo now existing entirely in your head, or when you close your eyes at night.

Dance often exists like this, as an ongoing echo. Transferred from one body to be reverberated by another. Learned once, passed on, reframed, echoed again and again.

I can’t confirm this with certainty, but I read somewhere that there is a style of Baroque court dance called echo, dating back to the 18th century. Knowledge too, is an echo.

I started thinking about echoes before I saw the works presented in Dancehouse’s first season of 2024. Recently, I learned about the etymology of the word echo. A friend released a book. I went along to the launch. It was introduced by an academic who read frantically scribbled and densely tangled notes. I learned a lot about Ekho the nymph, her relationship with Narcissus and her ill fate. The relationship between echoing and dancing felt to me like a neat and useful framework. Since then, I’ve thought of movement in this new way.

In anticipation of viewing each work, I read both statements on the Dancehouse website. This led me to reflect on short blurbs written about contemporary performance. How to sell a show, how to describe a work and how to entice an audience while maintaining integrity to the choreographer’s intent. With dance, it is often that language falls short. It is considered as something beyond the reach of the verbal. As Richard Turney suggests in his PhD thesis Reading Berger, Responding to the Literary it is an extraordinary thing to attempt to “recreate dance in the act of writing.”1

This written reflection considers two of the four works featured in Dancehouse’s 2024 Season 1, running from late February to March. The first performance I saw was titled Flesh Vessel and was choreographed by Jayden Lewis Wall and Melissa Yvonne Pham, performed by the aforementioned accompanied by Ashley Mclellan, with sound design by Alisdair Macindoe. Then I saw Echo, which was choreographed and performed by Thomas Woodman, with Megan Payne noted as an outside eye/text assistant. Both works had lighting design by Giovanna Yate Gonzalez.

Jayden Lewis Wall and Melissa Pham, Flesh Vessel, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Lukas White.

Flesh Vessel

As the work commenced, I wondered why these flesh vessels were veiled. What does this do to the affective quality of their movements? The costuming draws focus to the forms made by the bodies, do performers’ faces normally distract us? The dancers were wearing long leather coats, tightly fitted tops, long pants and balaclava-esque face coverings. Their hands were gloved. Their hair was plaited. Such details are not minor; they seem to ground the work and reflect the intentionality behind each decision. Beginning carefully, the plaited threesome—Jayden, Melissa and Ashley—weave intimately and meticulously. Two and then three dancers are held in a slow piggy-back embrace, Jayden shouldering the stacked weight. While looking at the pretzled limbs, I think, three is a good number.

As the performance unfolded, the dancers transitioned from synchronised duos and trios to individual explorations of movement, each moment punctuated by shifts in pace and tone of the lighting and score. There was a purple cyc wash across the back screen. Later, the lighting shifted to black with spotlights on each dancer. Melissa and Ashley’s duo was so fluidly synchronised and tender, it’s as if they could tap into a choreographic language known only to them. It is with this shared language that they express a deep interconnectedness with their articulate bodies.2 Layers of costuming were removed one by one as the work progressed, unveiling more layers and more flesh. Jayden’s solo, with its athletic grace and controlled power, served as a focal point amidst the swirling and linking. I thought about something Zadie Smith wrote when reflecting on Fred Astaire. She noted that his movement posed the question; “what if a body moved like this through the world?”3 To me, Jayden’s movement is emblematic of a certain type of discipline and dedication and I can imagine exactly how it carries him through this world.

Jayden Lewis Wall and Melissa Pham, Flesh Vessel, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Lukas White.

The dynamics of the trio were explored with exactitude and nuance, as their movements intertwined and diverged in an engrossing display of choreographic proficiency. The movements resembled chainlink, plaited and interlocking, each gesture precise and deliberate. Informed by a substyle of breakdance language called threading, the dancers illuminated bodily pathways that would otherwise seem impossible. Creating contact points, tracing them, manipulating them, collapsing them. A single dancer began to copy the movement of another dancer stacked atop the shoulders of the third. As the audience sat in a state of mesmerised calm, the dancers mirrored each other at different heights. Then came a moment where the mirroring intentionally breaks and slips, falling out of sync. This took me back to echoes and reverberations.

Standing in a row, slicing through spatial planes, barely missing one another, dodging and weaving. I marvelled at how they were able to move as if in a single breath. Now wearing only their underwear, backlit, their hair had come loose. The scratchy, whooshing score accentuated the dynamism of each dancer. Through their slicing movements and intricate dodges, they negotiated the space between one another with a palpable tension and the risk of near collision. Flesh Vessel navigates the boundaries of intimacy and anonymity and exemplifies technical clarity. Hyper accuracy mightn’t do more than impress, in the context of contemporary performance, but here it reflects the daily and consuming practice of Jayden and Melissa. Flesh Vessel is a testament to the potential of the body as a vessel for expression.

~

Though disparate works, with different aims, a commonality between Flesh Vessel and Echo is their relationship to anonymity (Thomas considered this a humorous tie between the works too). At times both look to simultaneously focus on the body and to disembody, to distort the relationality of the owner of the performing body and its viewer. They, the dancers, each work to obscure their bodies, or their identities, while focusing on one part of their body, or one particular intricacy of one movement.

Jayden Lewis Wall and Melissa Pham, Flesh Vessel, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Lukas White.

Echo

Echo begins in the foyer. The elevated screen above the toilets shows Thomas’ face. A close-up video of his mouth. We hear “H, h, h, Haitch, aitch, aitch, haitch, haitchhh.” Soft h, sharp h. We look at his lips, at his teeth and tongue for so long, while listening to this repetition, almost forgetting they belong to a face. For a moment, I wondered if the work would lead us into the theatre at all. At first, the stage was bare - a ladder, a lectern off to one side propped against the wall. Thomas was narrating and describing movement and we sat and imagined what it might look like. Later, it dawned on me that I was watching what was initially described.

While watching Thomas perform, I felt sensory irritation. The lights were semi-strobing and the sounds were disorientating, his voice was loud over a megaphone. Thomas created an earworm out of a phrase that was repeated frequently throughout the duration of Echo “...still chameleon,” that stayed put in my head for days. Despite sitting in a restless and heightened state during the work, I found lingering enjoyment in thinking about what Echo had managed to achieve by using or subverting simple theatre and staging tropes. Just as an echo is a reflection of sound, the chameleon’s skin echoes its affective state as a reflection of light. Chameleons change their appearance by changing the space between the guanine crystals in their pigmentation. This changes the wavelength of the light reflected off the crystals, which in turn changes the colour of their skin.4 Thomas’ work asks how one can disembody and considers the different ways in which we can mask ourselves. What does the chameleon represent here? They are a successful example of bodily concealment.

Thomas Woodman, Echo, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: James Lauritz.

Thomas was under the seating bank, speaking. He travelled in and out of sight and around the audience, extending the potential of the stage while narrating unreliably. The narrative sometimes aligned with what was occurring, what was just about to, or reflected what had happened prior. An arm appeared low, stage left, emerging from the curtains, dislocated from the body. The hand started to make letters, finger shapes. It looked like a shadow puppet. The arm stirred the pot so fast, it became a disassociated blur. A leg appeared, making ankle circles. “Every movement in history is gone before it is complete,” he said. An arm again. His movement was often interrupted by his own sentences, intentionally leaving blanks to conceal key names and dates, while reflecting on notable dancers and their histories. A slow pulsating light emerged and simultaneously the audience heard pre-recorded megaphone sentences.

The audience laughed at the comedy of his timing. Against my own will, I was charmed. In Echo, like a kid busting to show all their tricks at once, the tension between obscurity, concealment and recognition is particularly pronounced. My thoughts were interrupted as the megaphone announced something by itself again. Thomas picked up the ladder, carried the ladder and then climbed it. He moved across the stage embodying a chameleon. He had plastic eyeballs in his hands, the size of table tennis balls. He lay flat with one eye closed and the plastic eyeball held in his outstretched hand. The small ball existed in relation to Thomas’ face and with the lizard he continued to imitate. He used a small opaque spray bottle, firstly to kill his own hand, poking out of the side curtain, mimicking a bug, a spider. Then, atop the ladder, the release of the spray was synchronised with the arrival of fireworks appearing on the otherwise blank screen behind him.

Thomas Woodman, Echo, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: James Lauritz.

After being invited to consider these two works and in an attempt to respond fully and responsibly I asked Jayden, Melissa and Thomas if they would each be happy to speak with me.5

Jayden, Mel and I met online to discuss the performance and its creative process. We reflected on the dynamics of a trio. I saw Flesh Vessel in an earlier development stage at the end of last year with only two dancers. Two is intimate, three adds nuance, and makes the choreographic possibilities more interesting. We discussed what it means for dance to be good, for art to be good. I thought about the unspoken agreement I’ve often shared with a friend, a partner, a colleague—a surreptitious nod of agreement—yes that was good. Jayden and Mel spoke about wanting to make, “good dance.” How can we speak clearly about “good dance?” I like to think about it this way; Liat, an old friend of mine, is sitting next to me in the theatre during Flesh Vessel. I observe how her head moves when she is enraptured by movement. She follows it not only with her eyes but with her whole head, straining her neck slightly to follow the dancers, to map their movement as they traverse across the space. I think this is what Jayden means, I think this signifies good dancing.

In conversation with Thomas, I learned about the development of Echo. Having never met, we speak on the phone. Thomas started working on Echo in 2022. He began by participating in Dancehouse’s ‘Emerging Choreographer’s Program’ and through Performance Space’s ‘Live Dreams’ development. He wrote the bulk of the text that is performed while spending time in the library, at times with the assistance of Megan Payne. He then rented studio space and partook in a further residency with Lucy Guerin Inc. Thomas’s layered approach to the development of this work interests me. Particularly, the first phase that occurred at the library, a place known for its dedication to silence. It is an amusing place to think and write about echoes, while generating a backbone, as Thomas called it, to be performed aloud. Together, we considered how using text and theatre tropes felt like the most effective mediums for him to explore what it was that he was interested in. To momentarily disappear, dislocate and camouflage.

Thomas Woodman, Echo, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: James Lauritz.

Recently, Maggie Nelson reflected on the human urge to ask someone what they thought of a performance, or an artwork, immediately after viewing it, “...finding out what you think or feel about something can take time, and that time is always worth taking.”6 This is how I feel, months later, reflecting on two works of which, typically as dance does, the details now escape me. I lean on my notes, written while in the dark. This reflective writing is grounded in the generative conversations I’ve since had with the choreographers. Similarly to where I started, here’s where I’ve landed: I see an echo as a reverberation of the past. And also as an individual making work. And also as another name for dance. As movement lingers in one’s visual memory, these movements are always submerged in relation to another movement, another dancer and another performance. I interpret both works as echoes of what has happened before them, each existing now distinctly, resonating with a different energy.

Thomas Woodman, Echo, 2024, performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: James Lauritz.

  1. Richard Turney, “Reading Berger, Responding to the Literary,” PhD thesis from University of York (2015): 17.

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  2. This links back to my first thoughts on the failures and disconnect of verbal language in relation to body language.

  3. Zadie Smith, “Dance lessons for writers,” The Guardian, 29.19.16.

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  4. Sara Hipsher, “Do chameleons change their color to match their environment?” College of Arts + Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, 10.08.21.

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  5. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, (London: Routledge, 2004), 81.

  6. Maggie Nelson, Like Love - Essays and Conversations, (London: Random House, 2024), 12.

Isabella Hone-Saunder’s review of Flesh Vessel by Jayden Lewis Wall and Melissa Yvonne Pham and Echo by Thomas Woodman has been co-commissioned by Performance Review and Dancehouse.
Performance Review has partnered with Dancehouse to commission critical writing, responding to Dancehouse’s 2024 seasons. This writing has been independently commissioned and edited by Performance Review and financed by Dancehouse as a means of addressing these organisations’ mutual desire to build dance literacy in arts writing and to critically support emerging choreographic practice.

Isabella Hone-Saunders (they/she) is as a curator, arts worker and artist, born on Kaurna Country, now living in Naarm.

As curator and artist Isabella has worked with galleries and artist-run initiatives such as BLINDSIDE, Firstdraft, Cool Change Contemporary, FELTspace, KINGS-Ari, Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West, Melbourne Art Library, project8 Gallery, Watch This Space, Sister Gallery, Footscray Community Arts, Vitalstatistix, Seventh, Trocadero, West Space, Cathedral Cabinet, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West, Incinerator Gallery and as a TCB board member.

Isabella works as Assistant Curator, Art Museums, University of Melbourne. Formerly working as Director of Seventh Gallery, in the Curatorial team at ACMI and as Assistant Curator at ACCA. Previously they worked at Testing Grounds as Program Manager, as Engagement Coordinator at Channels Festival International Video Art Biennial, as well as in positions at Maningrida Arts and Culture, Kaldor Public Arts Projects, Next Wave and Flinders University Art Museum.

Currently, they are researching and centring ‘hope’ as a generative and radical, curatorial and artistic device, and embodied discipline, to imagine our collective futures.

Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.