Written by Damian Castaldi
Image courtesy of Chunky Move

http://www.chunkymove.com.au/home.html

Short and possessed, pulling demons from the floor using state of the art motion capture technology is my kind of performance. Glow really did glow for me! It “glistened in motion”, twisted in a jet stream for the 1,560 seconds of performance time.

To begin, a small buffoon type creature pulled itself along the floor to center stage. It twisted and turned, sort of untangled itself into a “her”. The creature was a thin, attractive, cotton-clad female, drawn in by a series of shifting white lines projected onto the floor, criss-crossed and hatched to the scratchy, electronic and utterly intoxicating opening sound-scape.

The scene was set quickly. The unfolding scenario demarcated between the female creature, the technology projecting video and graphics from above and a rectangular space identified by a white mat on the floor. The intensity of the performance was revealed in the creature’s connection to the floor and her constantly shifting, growing lines of black, white and mauve light wrapped around the outer parameters of her arms, legs, head, shoulders, hands and feet as she modified her X, Y axis. The sound was ever present but the tones and frequencies (for the time being) remained outside the inner central rectangular space, filling the outer parameters of the Studio.

Within the horizontal stripes, jet streams and spirographs the creature seemed at times to be so utterly contained in that light, I imagined a transparent third dimension in a sort of anguish, trying to push out, away, to escape the web she was incapable of releasing herself from. Her high pitched guttural squeaks and groans progressed over the short time to a craving, running bursts of incomprehensible exclamation, explosions from a soon to be cadaver, get this demon out of me!!

And then the interaction between video, sound and body was sensational. A climax of horrific, ghostly crescendos, I saw and heard a type of shadow formed in movement and sound released into her upright body and then into the night. This was matched in the finale by an explosive guitar distortion that the creature seemed to twitch and shake to in a bowed-like spherical shape on the floor. Standing upright again and in her final moment she reduced the video, light and sound projection, squeezed them into a hole in the floor, as if pushed into and then sucked out by an invisible priestly presence that exorcised the demon.

There were minor problems with this performance. It seemed to lag slightly in the middle and the Studio railing broke my line of sight at times but overall it was intoxicating. I saw something I can honestly say I haven’t seen before, a simple but complex narrative unfolding between a body, its motion, the space, consumed by a vision of graphic, video, sound and technology but still so guttural, from the soul, exploding from deep within.