Showing for three nights only from November 15 – 17, leading Australian choreographer Jo Lloyd’s Confusion for Three promises to be a thrilling dance encounter.
Fusing Lloyd’s signature style of explosive physicality, music mixed live, and tour de force performances, it asks us to surrender to the state of confusion for ultimate revelation. PICA has partnered with STRUT Dance for the WA premiere of this exciting contemporary dance work.
Dancers Rebecca Jensen, Shian Law and Jo Lloyd generate hypnotic tension as they negotiate a progressively unravelling system of choreography, based on a distinctive method created by Lloyd. Navigating their physical histories – from traces of folk dance to idiosyncratic body rhythms – the performers reveal a series of desperate encounters, in a destabilising flood of movement.
Set to music arranged live by composer Duane Morrison, each show is unique, centred around the dancers’ and musician’s improvisations and responses to each other.
The work grew out of a residency at Lucy Guerin Inc in 2013 where Lloyd found herself alone in a studio looking for inspiration and began falling through space.
“I thought, I don’t know what this is. My body was purging out this vocabulary I didn’t understand,” Lloyd said.
Feeling that she was onto something, nevertheless, one of her notes to herself was the word “confusion”, and that became an enabling theme of the methodology of the movement. Exploring the idea with Shian Law and Rebecca Jensen, two dancers she has worked with for many years, she used different approaches to introduce them to what she had created, and they arrived at very similar points.
Lloyd credits Law and Jensen, who will perform alongside her at PICA, as significant contributors to the work as a whole.
In the creation of Confusion for Three Lloyd deliberately avoided the comfort of familiarity. Her agenda was to “make what you don’t know how to make.”
Rejecting known paths of choreography, Lloyd describes her Confusion method as developing the parameters and the scaffolding for the performance.
“When we know these parameters, we know what could happen, but we don’t know what will happen. And then there’s that feedback between us, negotiating each other’s choices, leading and following. And being passive and active.”
“We draw on the histories of our bodies, the physical history of dance training, of our upbringing, our ancestry.” Lloyd said.
Lloyd has also introduced new dance vocabulary to the work following workshops with a krump artist, finding the intense, expressive and exaggerated street style was very compatible with the concerns of Confusion. The immediacy of personal experience, day to day experiences, moods, and chance moments all play a role in what happens in the creative process during the performance.
Confusion for Three is a show for lovers of dance, contemporary work, and choreography with high energy and explosive physicality. If you like a challenge, the curious and the unknown – this is for you! Three shows only – don’t miss the opportunity to embrace the confusion.
Catch the show at PICA from Thursday
Source: Media Release, images Gregory Lorenzutti
