Held

By Kim O’Connor

Inventive and engaging moments of contemporary dance held together by flat, collage-like interludes. The dancers’ movements held by the camera in images that replicate the real, but not entirely. Held in the eye of the audience by pulses of lighting and the blinking flash of the camera for a moment in which the dance becomes freeze-frame.

Held, Australian Dance Theatre’s latest production, is an experiment in the visual potential of contemporary dance. Throughout most of the performance, a camera follows the dancers’ movements and relays images from the floor onto screens at either side of the stage. Lighting is manipulated to cast shadow and moods of colour, so that movements are variously obscured or highlighted. The dance is sharp and distinctly unromantic, even when the choreography invokes traditional steps.

Held is an interesting concept that relentlessly demands the audience’s attention. Some of its ideas are sharp and humorous observations of our visual, sexually coded culture. At times, though, it is in danger of becoming as empty as the purely visual can be and the images of the dancers begin to look worryingly like a Benetton advert.