Melbourne winters usually invite you to do one thing: hibernate under a heated blanket with a good book and pretend society does not exist while you wait for the sun to come back. But the City of Melbourne’s Now or Never festival has other plans.
Time Remaining sits well within the broader mission of Now or Never, which explores the theme around transformation, new dimensions and what the world could feel like due to rapidly changing technologies and artificial intelligence reshaping our reality.
Stepping into the historic grandeur of the Melbourne Town Hall, my plus one (who somehow hadn’t been here before) was half-expecting a tedious bureaucratic meeting, and instead was greeted by a full house of contemporary dance fans eagerly awaiting one of this festivals key events.
Time Remaining is the latest dance work from premier contemporary dance heavyweights Chunky Move. Celebrated globally for three decades of bold, genre-defying performance, this iconic Melbourne-based company knows a thing or two about pushing physical boundaries. Having seen a few of their shows in the past, I was prepared for something truly special again, unfortunately I was left wanting.
If you thought your smartphone was already a bit too clingy, this production explores the awkward, sweaty tango between fragile human agency and unblinking machine control. As the dancers moved around the vast town hall, lights suspended on motorised wires would occasionally interact with where they were placed. While this may have worked well in a smaller venue, the huge Town Hall room dwarfed the performers making them an after thought to the lighting. For those audience members on the top row who couldn’t even see much of what happened, the inappropriately large room size for what was offered was made even more obvious.
Artistic director and choreographer Antony Hamilton did not build this alone, of course. He roped in a band of digital tech nerds (complimentary), including technical designer Nick Roux and sound creative Nicholas Moloney, who rigged the venue with scanning lasers and lights on motorised winches that move with balletic precision. The sound design and lighting was clearly the best part of this performance, which is an unfortunate thing to say about a dance show.
Time Remaining is a curious performance that on paper should work; man vs machine in a dance for control. However the execution and blocking within such a big space left a lot lacking and we would have loved to see more careful coordination between the lights, music and dancers. The final act where photographers moved onto the stage was great, but felt at odds with everything that had come before it. Talking to some other audience members as we were ushered out of the building, we were all left a little perplexed at exactly what we were meant to take away from this show. While Time Remaining didn’t hit the mark for us, there are plenty of other interesting shows over the next week at Now or Never so be sure to see what else is on offer.
– The Plus Ones
