OVERWORLD
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OVERWORLD

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“We are looking at the uninhibited access, the unlimited instant access to all these different things, and how we participate in spirituality in the same way as everything else,” Jensen explains. “It’s ‘pop culture meets the ancient world.’” Aiken describes the show as an audience-centred combination of yoga, dance, and ritual. “There’s a bit of magic involved.” Aiken and Jensen are joined on stage by Janine Proust and Rachel Coulson, chosen for their star signs. “There are four of us in the cast – corresponding to the elements of air, fire, water and earth. I’m Cancer so I’m water, so I wear blue fluffy pants,” says Aiken. Along with its tongue-in-cheek aspects, Aiken says there’s a range of emotions elicited in the work. “It’s a bizarre amazing trip. There are light-hearted moments and more poignant moments. We look at the dark side of trust. With anything on the Internet, we don’t know all the facts. This piece takes you on a journey, there are funny moments but then you can feel lost, left behind; it can be sinister. It’s difficult to perform; it’s quite intense; we can never just be where we are. Keeping track of yourself – it’s not unenjoyable but it’s overwhelming. Making the work organically, the whole experience is really varied. At the end we’re responding to film clips, creating re-enactments, there’s Nikki Minaj. Chris Brown. There’s an old man. He’s dancing. Then there’s a scene of someone getting shot in the back of the head.”

 

Co-creator Sarah Aiken explains further: “The dance reflects how in today’s world we’re never really in the one place at the one time; we’re always accessing information, communicating through technology with other people who aren’t physically there. The internet is a levelled platform with ease of access, everything’s on the same plateau. We’ll be dancing to pop songs, moving to past life regressions, screaming, wrestling, we’re putting ourselves in different modes according to all of that information. It changes rapidly and the audience shares that experience. It’s humanity without connections with each other. If you follow YouTube down that side panel, it leads you down to some creepy territory.”

 

How did the two know where to even begin making choices as to what to include in the work? “Our method, it’s a check through method,” answers Jensen. “We look at something, it reminds us of something else, and the sound, the shape of the body, came out of it. It’s like a game of association. We’ve invested seriously in making the work, in ritualising everything yet it references everything and nothing. All is even. Things we turn into ritual. It’s applied exactly the same way.” “It’s like a collage of movement in real time,” adds Aiken. “We act out, physicalize, what we’ve found. The effect on the audience will be different for each person. The audience will have a lot of different experiences. As we are. Some of the content has become funny accidentally. We bombard the audience with a lot of repetitive abstract sounds.”

 

The sound score is by RRR’s Andras Fox. “We knew his work just from hearing him on the radio, listening to his radio show,” Aiken says. “We’re fans of his new age music. We approached him. Incidentally, this has turned into a greater collaboration; the music for this work is now pressed on vinyl. It has a whole other life. There’s a lot of good collaboration around Melbourne.” Fox’s score works in the dance to create a sense of ritual and engagement with new age spirituality on both a serious and an ironic kind of post-modern level at the same time, in accordance with the themes of OVERWORLD. “The ritualistic structure needed to have a balanced space,” says Jensen. “With music, with sound, we wanted to go with Andras Fox and his new age music, even if in the dance we use it tongue-in-cheek. He’s genuinely interested in it, he genuinely believes in what he’s engaged with, he’s a fan of the form. He questioned our relationship to irony: ‘are you guys serious?’”

 

“It’s our first full length work,” continues Aiken. “The challenge is in the logistics – doing everything for the first time, sorting venues, technicians, theatres, securing funding, bumping in, late night writing grant applications.” The nature of OVERWORLD means that knowing when it was completed was almost arbitrary. “We could make a sequel – Underworld. We can definitely renew it at some point but we have to put a lid on it for now, get some fresh air.” 

BY LIZA DEZFOULI