Dance is a form of interpretation. Through it, we can transform the individual and their place in the environment. Dance has the ability to shift, beguile and communicate in a way that language can’t.
For Martin del Amo, dance is a way for him to explore the relationship between the individual and the place they occupy. His new work, It’s A Jungle Out There, del Amo has created a piece which incorporates dance, movement and spoken text, with collaborator Gail Priest supplying an experimental and electronic sound score, one filled with field recordings.
‘I have been interested in the relationship between body and place for a couple of years now,’ del Amo confided. ‘I wanted to put the city at the centre of that exploration so I’m looking at the city as an ever changing organism and how it impacts on the human body.
‘In order to do research on that I was really looking at how my methodology could tackle that subject matter and it became clear to me that I actually had to go into the city to learn more about it. So I conducted a series of excursions into the city, always changing one factor from the way we usually experience the city.
‘I did excursions walking backwards through the inner city, skipping through the CBD, I went blindfolded along a very busy road during rush hour, I did one crawling on all fours and another one I spent 24 hours outside my house trying to compress the experience of one day in the city into 24 hours.’
These excursions weren’t meant to be performative but rather experiential. From them del Amo generated enough material to create a diverse show where the city’s density is recreated on the stage.
‘I became very aware of the formality of the city,’ del Amo said of how the excursions informed his work. ‘It’s the street grids, it’s the rigidity of the architecture, the maps that are inherent to the city, and all that is in contrast to the randomness and chaos that pulsates within that. So it’s that frantic, disjointed, vibrant, adverse, exhilarating nature of the city that kind of happens in the labyrinthine structure that is the architecture and the street grid.’
Within this work there are some movement sections which focus on the walking, the mapping out of a city. There are also spoken word sections which explore the convention of walking and encountering other people.
‘Then there’s also more complex dance material that is inspired by the multi directionality and multi levels of the city sections that explore the disorientation one can experience in the city, but also a constant navigation of the city and the complexity of the city.’
If it sounds like heavy stuff, don’t worry… it makes for incredibly beautiful dance.
It’s A Jungle Out There appears at PICA from March 18 to March 20. www.pica.org.au
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
