Dancehouse Presents DANCE MASSIVE 2017

Dancehouse is delighted to present seven remarkable and uncompromising works as part of Dance Massive 2017, Australia's only contemporary dance festival, a prominent example of the quality of and appetite for Australian contemporary dance. Since 2009, Dance Massive has welcomed over 41,000 visitors to over 400 performances. The quality and scale of Dance Massive programming, combining the artistic vision of three artistic directors (Dancehouse, Arts House and Malthouse), has drawn artists and audiences globally and made Melbourne a focal point for Australia's dance arts.

Dancehouse's Artistic Director, Angela Conquet, comments: "There is a certain form of ritual revisited that arises from economies of repetition and its durational dynamics, which open up the borders of time and enable a certain quality of focus and attention. Often, the dancers do not do much and in this scarceness of movement, there is time to attend even more sharply to every adjustment of weight, shift of the gaze or flow of breath and to feel how vividly we are occupied by: animality, cultural identity, machines, ritual, history, space closing in and time passing by. This is where dance begins to produce itself, to occupy us and to ignite our inner awareness of how we can, individually and together, return to being."

The Dancehouse program travels through the marketplace, at once unmoored from time and place in the digital age and yet embodied, felt and defined by a delicate equilibrium of binaries - majestic and mundane; real and imaginary; dystopia and fantasy; peace and chaos.

Dancehouse's performance program is complemented by a rich public program of workshops and a series of conversations in partnership with Victorian College of the Arts including special guest and prominent New York Times critic Claudia La Rocco (USA) who will run two workshops on dance writing.

PERFORMANCES:

IF IT'S ALL IN MY VEINS • 23-25 Mar, 8pm; 26 Mar, 6pm • World Premiere
Martin Hansen's work if it's all in my veins disrupts and reimagines the history of contemporary dance, unmoored from time and place in the digital age. Inter-generational cast Hellen Sky, Michelle Ferris and Georgia Bettens, accompanied by animated GIFs displaying excerpts of dance iconography, re-energise the punk/DADA fantasy of 'no future'. Emerging from an initial exploration presented in the Keir Choreographic Award Finals in 2016, if it's all in my veins is a flamboyant and prophetic statement on how the past is produced and reproduced.

STELLAR PROJECT • 18-21 Mar, 8.30pm • World Premiere
Internationally acclaimed choreographer and dancer Prue Lang presents her second work since her return to Australia - the world premiere of Stellar Project. Working with five dancers, Lang continues to probe the mysteries of the cosmos via the human body, this time embarking on a stellar projection that gestures toward infinity: a sublime experience of spacelessness and timelessness that questions our place in the world.

NOISE QUARTET MEDITATION • 19-22 Mar, 7pm
Investigating the thin line between peace and chaos, 2015 Green Room Award winner Lilian Steiner (Lucy Guerin Inc., Balletlab) brings her astute work, Noise Quartet Mediation, to Dance Massive. Performed by Steiner and fellow dancer Briarna Longville, alongside noise percussionists Jennie Nikes and Atticus Bastow, Noise Quartet Meditation amplifies the most imperceptible vibrations until they roar. The three bodies work as one to test the threshold between the turbulent and the tranquil, finding peace in chaos.

SMALL DETAILS • 15-17 Mar, 8.30pm
Performed by three dancers who engage with dystopic kinetic sculptures designed by new media artist Rhian Hinkley, Small Details is the latest of preeminent, award-winning choreographer Sandra Parker's highly sophisticated creations. Focusing on the vulnerabilities of the human body in an increasingly automated world, Small Details is a brave work whose cyclic repetitions build to create an astonishing and foreboding power. Also a part of Dance Massive, Rhian Hinkley hosts the workshop Building Kinetic Sculptures (18 Mar, 10am-12pm), giving kids aged 8-12 the chance to build their own moving robotic sculptures.

CREATURE • 16 & 18 Mar, 6pm; 19 Mar, noon, Carlton Baths
Australian-born Geneva-based choreographer József Trefeli returns home for the first time to present two explosive works in unconventional offsite locations with fellow Hungarian co-choreographer Gábor Varga. With an ethnographic eye, Creature examines the archaic exoticism of folk dances and its kinship with the language of contemporary dance. The result is an unpredictable, energetic piece, rich with self-deprecating humour and extravagant costumes.

JINX 103 • 25-26 Mar, noon & 4pm, Neill Street Reserve
Taking dance to public spaces, the inimitable József Trefeli and Gábor Varga present a second outdoor work for Dance Massive, Jinx 103. This highly musical work sees the duo use rhythm and ritual to face-off, breaking out of the black box to embrace the site-specific encounter. Through their common vocabulary of Hungarian folklore and body percussion, Trefeli and Varga communicate in a joyful, high-energy dance of kicks, claps, slaps and lightning-fast footwork whose charm and rigour is infectious. After their performance on the 26th, they share their explosive positivity with workshop participants of all ages for Body Percussion (26 Mar, 1-2pm).

BODIED ASSEMBLIES • 14-17 Mar, 7pm
NSW choreographer Rhiannon Newton makes a beguiling proposal in Bodied Assemblies as a group of bodies come together to explore ways of being together and creating change as a community. Intimately set in the round, Bodied Assemblies explores the capacity of the dancing body to act collectively using the equilibrium of the natural environment as a starting point. Multiple bodies become one as the dancers find the average of their individual movements-a metaphor for social cohesiveness that reveals the importance of mutual sacrifice, labour and action.

EXTRA MASSIVE - Dancehouse Public Program
16-17 & 20-22 March, 1pm - THE BODY. NEXT (Conversation series with the Victorian College of the Arts)
18 March, 10am - BUILDING KINETIC SCULPTURES with Rhian Hinkley
19 March, 1pm - CREATIVE DIFFERENCES with Claudia La Rocco (for everyone) 20-24 March, 10am-2pm - WRITING ON, IN, AND THROUGH DANCE with Claudia La Rocco (for arts writers and critics)
26 March, 1pm - BODY PERCUSSION with Jozsef Trefeli and Gabor Varga