Photo: Branco Gaica
Murphy's extraordinary ingenuity as a choreographer provides a three-part program of continuous surprise and beauty. The dancers ebb and flow along a stream of magnificent body language. They make Murphy's extravagant demands on their anatomies seem perfectly natural. Such masterful performance can be born only of immense discipline and many, many hours of impeccable rehearsal.
That the Sydney Dance Company is Australia's top dance group is not worth debating after seeing such performance. Their constant flow of interesting imagery, body patterns one might never have imagined and moments of pure art and artistry is enough to keep audience members wide-eyed and riveted to their seats. (A Voyage Through) Some Rooms is an unlikely subject for dance.
a ghostly gossamer quality to much of this dance with
some very effective use of back projection and light-play. Throughout
this and the other sections of the Voyage, the dancers' motions,
interactions and contortions of body continue to surprise and
amaze. Murphy uses every muscle of his dancers' bodies. He even
choreographs their mouths to startling silent screams.In the Bathroom scene - with a man and a woman going about their ablutions - the fantasies and visitations continue, imposing on the clinical starkness of the room a phantasmagorical and sometimes threatening other world inhabited by bishops and priests in hellfire red and the tortured soul of The Voyager.
The Changing Room is sheer wit and spectacle, yet again riddled with surprises in both movement and costume. The exuberance of dance in that scene is starkly contrasted with the almost zen tranquillity of the last dance, the Reading Room.
The Sydney Dance Company, with these all-too-brief adventures in rooms, provides a positively magic experience of top-notch dancing to peerlessly inventive and aesthetic choreography. It rightly commands the use of the old cliche ``not to be missed.''
11 April 1986
