Keep Everything – Chunky Move

Overview

Keep Everything is dance theatre for people who can appreciate the absurdity of human social behaviour and love hearing a beat drop. This new offering from Chunky Move continues the company’s mission to playfully redefine the limits of contemporary dance. It's charming, entrancing and fun.

It begins dramatically: human bodies barely visible through surging projections and thick smog. We are transported to a post-apocalyptic landscape — made magical by the music of Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes (of The Presets fame). Yet, just as soon as we’re accustomed to the electronic rhythms and droning atmosphere of this sci-fi wasteland, all the lights are up and the performers are over-exposed. The scene transitions through the piece are carefully thought-out and a joy to experience. Lighting, music and projection all work together to hurtle us along the evolutionary journey of humans — from morphing jellyfish-masses to haute-couture models.

The choreography by Antony Hamilton never takes itself too seriously. It is clear to see that improvisation and repeated physical and verbal phrases have formed the basis of the work, which seems to respond to gibberish emitting from the mouths of the dancers and to laugh out loud at the direct audience address, “How are ya?”

The trio of dancers (Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois, Alisdair Macindoe) speak in grunts and abstract sounds and dance in digital code. They push the boundaries of their human spines and structures to create part-machine, part-animal bodies that offend our civility. They tell us the human body is simply a series of circles and angles then prove this point with a prolonged unison dance sequence so precise I dubbed it the ‘robot rebirthing’... only moments before it deteriorated into a night-club rave.

At the heart of Keep Everything is an exploration of how humans connect and communicate, and the audience is forced to reflect and critique our own speech. Aren’t we all just speaking gibberish that we somehow collectively understand? “Ye-ah”, comes the dancers’ answer, as they learn onstage to make meaning out of random patterns.

The set is a clean white floor, covered on one side with what appears to be pastel building-blocks, and on the other with industrial waste: from order and progress to pollution and disrepair. This bittersweet view of human evolution is maintained throughout, from the seamless switches of organic, fluid movements into robotic body isolations to the rogue 'lap dog' (brought brilliantly to life by Langlois), who refuses to submit to human control any longer.

The work claims to keep everything, but is neither too long nor indulgent. It casts a questioning eye on our human behaviour and makes us laugh at how far we’ll go to try to connect.