DANCE
Ocean (an arrangement) ★★★★
Martyn Myer Arena, until June 12
It’s wonderful that the enterprising Carol Brown, head of dance at the VCA, has won permission from the Merce Cunningham Trust to stage material from the great choreographer’s much-admired Ocean. Arranged with Melissa Toogood, a former Cunningham dancer, this production features an ensemble of 20 performers and a live score played by guitarist Cameron Deyell.
The dancers rush in and out through multiple entrances in wave after wave.Credit: Gregory Lorenzutti
The show is performed on a circular stage with the audience seated all around. The dancers rush in and out through multiple entrances in wave after wave, twisting and turning, dipping and rising, pausing and skipping in an extraordinary display of colour and group movement.
This is not an exhibition of Cunningham technique, with its emphasis on unexpected alignments, difficult poses and intricate articulations of the back and hips. Instead, what these young dancers offer is an engagement with the Cunningham ethos of collaboration and the Cunningham spirit of unpredictability and exploration.
There are, all the same, many fine examples of famous Cunningham moves – such as the multiple whipping turns as the dancers enter. There are also many clever and quirky Cunningham details that hold of your attention amid all the swirling and swerving.
This production features an ensemble of 20 performers.Credit: Gregory Lorenzutti
The new score consists of Deyell on electric guitar, with plenty of effects units to create a vast and shimmery sound. Deyell is a natural choice for this project because he is a sailor himself and his work is often inspired by encounters with the ocean. His contribution suggests a sense of constant movement beneath apparently calm surfaces.
The show is presented in two halves. First is the arrangement of Cunningham’s material and the second is a response to that material devised by the ensemble.
Taken together, the two halves are a reminder of the sensual pleasure of watching a large and enthusiastic ensemble patterning and repatterning a stage coloured as if by many waves.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann
MUSIC
Sky Ferreira ★★★★
Rising Festival, Forum, June 4
Bathed in a rainbow of coloured lights and wearing sunglasses til past midnight, indie pop star Sky Ferreira left everything on the stage of Melbourne’s Forum on Tuesday night. Many in the eager and encouraging crowd had been waiting to see her since her last Melbourne outing a decade ago. She left them wanting for nothing.
Sky Ferreira performs at Forum Melbourne on June 4, 2024.Credit: Brodie Lancaster
She tore through tracks from her landmark 2013 debut, Night Time, My Time, along with some gems from her earlier catalogue and some select and affecting covers.
The scorching Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay) finds its twin, later in the set, with a cover of Suzanne Vega’s Luka. The songs are in conversation with one another, as are the 20-year-old MySpace star who wrote the former and the 31-year-old standing before us belting out, “I guess I’d like to be alone … just don’t ask me how I am”.
Sky Ferreira’s 2022 performance at the 50th Roskilde Festival in Denmark.Credit: Rune Hellestad- Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
The headlines that surrounded her Sydney show earlier this week felt overblown – as did the claims of the TikTokers declaring walkouts when she arrived later than advertised. So let me get the facts out of the way first: she stepped on stage of Melbourne’s Forum at 10.12pm – about half an hour past her scheduled set time. The final notes from her closing track, the propulsive Everything is Embarrassing, rang out almost two hours later. Hardly a half-hearted affair. And when you’ve waited a decade to hear her live, what’s another half an hour?
In an era of perfectly primped, poised and press-trained pop stars, Ferreira is an anomaly. She always has been. When access and information is prized, the way Ferreira shrinks from the spotlight tends to baffle and bemuse.
She delivers fascinating and honest insights in interviews, but on stage, something about the combination of lights, a microphone and thousands of eyes on her seem to zap her of confidence.
She apologises between songs, mutters something that sounds like, “I feel like I’m mumbling …”, and lets the ends of her sentences wander off like lost children as she confesses that singing makes you “look stupid … I feel stupid”.
Repeated and visible troubles with her in-ear monitors and microphone force Ferreira to restart songs here and there. They’re the kind of commonplace tech hiccups that would mean nothing for any other artist, but mistakes are loaded for Ferreira and the young women branded “troubled” – as she was from her formative moments in the public eye. They’re allowed far fewer opportunities to course correct. When her band roars to life behind her, Ferreira finds her footing again, and it feels redemptive and validating each time her voice soars across the theatre’s gothic, painted ceiling.
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As the hour closes in on midnight, I’m struck with the thought that perhaps at the core of the critiques of Ferreira’s live show lies a simple branding issue: she came up in a time when flitting between genres wasn’t fashionable, and so became a “pop star”.
Her songs were catchy and danceable; it made sense. But it always fit a little untidily on her. If any label were to capture her Melbourne set, it would be punk. She’s more Patti Smith than Taylor Swift. Impulsive and impressive, goofy and generous.
Allowing her a little grace and embracing messy spontaneity can only make the future pop scene – the one where Ferreira might, one day, release her long-delayed second album into – a more interesting place for both performers and listeners.
Brodie Lancaster has worked for Rising in a freelance capacity.
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