Fast, free-form, and fierce, CoExist Collective proves itself as a company on the rise, and one to watch.
In a fast, mysterious programme of two works – Layered Point, for six-member troupe; and VOYAGER #3 for two solo performers – the emerging dance company CoExist Collective showcased an impressive fusion of synchronisation and mysticism in last night’s performance at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
The suggestive title of the latter work was introduced via the curious voyage undertaken by the audience to find our seats. Weaving through the neon-flooded stalls and performance spaces of the Carlton Trades Hall, Fringe ushers led us through the lobby of a smaller building filled with ornate Chinese teapots.
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There, we entered a small dance studio flanked with two short rows of chairs, reinforcing the secretive nature of the performance. The first work, inspired by the body’s response to transitional periods and past traumas, opened with the six performers pressed into the floor as abstract sound design began to accelerate in tempo.
Dressed in a uniform of loose linen trousers and sleeveless tops, the six performers confidently weaved in between one another with repetitive, flexing motions possessed of a muscular, hypnotic quality. Built around a shifting axis that moved across the stage within the collective body of the dancers, the choreography maintained a strong structural form amidst such seemingly spontaneous movement.
The sustained sense of unreality within these spiralling, repeating motions was underlined by the assured, direct gaze of the performers. Each of them held their eyes up and out over the audience at some distant, mysterious point, not once glancing at their feet or their fellow performers for reassurances as to where to place themselves or throw their arms.
This tightness of motion and strength of mobility continued with the second work, a piece for solo dancers inspired by NASA space probes of the 1970s, launched to document extraterrestrial life. The costume change here reflected this, both performers dressed in large oversized parkas reminiscent of spacesuits in their rustling, billowy shapelessness.
Exercising fiercely sophisticated sequences of movement, dancers Jack Birdseye and Jel Menta created a breathless, fluid thread of body-pop Berlin techno and free-form trance-like expressions. Beneath a filter of hot pink neon lighting and flickering blue strobes, the work satisfied its evocative title in taking the audience on just as much a voyage as the choreography’s original space-age inspirations.
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