Choreographer and Director: Léa Tirabasso
Cellular death may not be an obvious subject for dance but Léa Tirabasso’s piece Starving Dingoes is an exploration of group dynamics and responses to the ‘dysfunctional element’, although you may not get that without reading the programme notes in advance. Performed for one night only at The Place as part of its eclectic Spring Season, Starving Dingoes is a continuous loose movement piece and dance in its most abstract form.
With no story as such, Tirabasso’s choreography begins in the dark with a crackling hum as so many dance shows now do, before five performers emerge into the light crawling in unison across the stage on their bellies. Designed by Nicolas Tremblay and Thomas Bernard, the floor is covered in sand or dirt through which the dancers move, creating shifting, swirling patterns that are quickly erased by the next configuration and movement style.
Tirabasso’s stated purpose is to show a race through the body and, in formulating this piece, has worked with cancer scientists. Yet, none of that is clear from the shape of Starving Dingoes, neither its specific relation to the human body nor any association with the spreading of disease. Instead, the audience watches repetitive sequences and chains of activity that last around 50-minutes, exploring the nature of belonging, leadership and coordination.
And Starving Dingoes is a strange experience, one that must be carefully and selectively choreographed with structured chapters that is made to look haphazard, unformed and entirely random. And notwithstanding the incredible effort of the five dancers in creating an endless loop of interactions, it looks as exhausting and complicated to perform as it is to experience, leaving you wondering why and how the episodes or chapters link together to form an overall statement and purpose.
The dance itself includes sections in which the performers work in unison, all presenting the same coordinated movement in a close pack. At other times they work as a two and three arrangement presenting slightly different skits before finding a way to reunite completely. There are pulse-led sections where dancer Karl Fagerland Brekke implies an electric shock or fit of some kind that shudders through the wider team quite effectively while at other times different dancers lead changes of pace that others then follow suggesting no one has individual agency, reacting only to the new circumstances around them.
But there are equally perplexing moments where deliberate absurdism feels overly affected and without purpose. For several minutes Catarina Barbosa is cradled in the arms of Alistair Goldsmith from whom she breastfeeds, switching sides midway through which seems at odds with the notion of being inside the body. And while a lot of performers will suffer for their art, sucking on a colleague’s chest is surely beyond the call of duty.
Over time, Starving Dingoes has a compelling quality that forces the audience to just absorb all these changes of pace, rhythm and movement and not try to understand what they mean. Tirabasso’s choreography is complex and clearly athletic to perform but its relation to the synopsis feels hazy and it is hard to sustain enthusiasm for its strange form over nearly an hour. Like the creatures in her story, it just goes round and round in circles.
Reviewed on 12 February 2022
