Melbourne’s Rising Festival is a yearly staged celebration of arts, music and performance. Now in its fifth iteration the festival is back bigger than ever, stretching across many venues new and old in the city.
Festival Hall, one of Melbourne’s most revered venues operating since the 1950s and having hosted everyone from The Beatles to Massive Attack, was the venue for Voyage Into Infinity, a multi-disciplinary event created by New York based artist Narcissister. The show is inspired by ’90s hardcore band Bad Brains’ song of the same name and takes place across a stage of delicately placed objects such as cardboard cylinders, plastic buckets, elevated platforms and slides, balloons, a swing, objects secured by ropes and wires and a version of the ancient Greek statue the discuss thrower. For readers of a certain age, it resembles an oversized version of the children’s game, Mousetrap.
Having appeared out of a wooden box one by one, three female performers interact with these elements whilst wearing old fashioned matching pinafore dresses topped with curly long wigs. The performers don’t speak to each other but rather communicate through hand signals and head tilts while staring through their unnervingly expressionless masks. The result is a like a mute Hans Christian Andersen fairytale teasingly brought to life.
The performers roam the stage seemingly working out its dimensions and possibilities when one carrying a multi candlelit candelabra sets one of the securing ropes on fire, which causes a box that it held in place to come crashing down. A series of on-going actions have equal part reactions as they variously perform acts that trigger loud pyrotechnics including flaming ropes and other parts of the set. The performers variously form part of the stunts that they carry out collapsing elements of the stage around them. The result is systematically chaotic and is strongly visual and entertaining with the audience anticipating where the next fire or explosion will come from or what will collapse next.
The performers produce bursts of dance throughout swaying, leaping and rolling on the floor to a soundscape produced live by a musician using a Theremin amongst other instruments to create a disquieting musical language to accompany and drive the changing stages of the performance.
Later after shedding their outfits, they ready themselves as a curtain at the back of the stage parts to reveal a band on an elevated platform who launch into the song that gives the show its name. The rendition is loud and very present, counterpointing the speechless performers as they dance a final time.
Not long after having dressed themselves once more, the performers return one by one to the wooden box from which the appeared and their Voyage Into Infinity is over.
Review by Stephen Corvini
