“I believe that anything can be choreography,” says Perry, “even text and stories if they’re chopped up and made rhythmic. Dance becomes more paragraphic than it is linear”.
It comes as no surprise then that literature served as the initial inspiration for Perry’s latest show, Double Think, which will be showcased as part of this year’s Melbourne Festival. After reading an article on “the illusion of opposites”, Perry recalled the concept of ‘doublethink’ coined by George Orwell in his speculative classic, 1984 – a frighteningly prescient vision of the not-too-distant future.
Under the omniscient eye of Big Brother, doublethink becomes the only way for citizens to reconcile the political indoctrinations that they know, in their heart of hearts, are false. Orwell defined doublethink as the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory,” allowing one “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them”. In this nightmare world of perpetual war, public surveillance and mind control at the hands of ‘the Party’, this dual cognition becomes a necessary means of survival.
“It’s an ability that everyone develops eventually when the world gets to the point that it does in that book, and it’s sort of the only way to exist,” explains Perry. “I thought it’d be nice to apply that concept of being able to believe in two contradictory ideas to the act of performing and to a show”.
Double Think has been three years in development, gaining the green light after Perry received the inaugural Harold Mitchell Fellowship last year. Perry had initially cast himself in the lead role, but after choreographing a third of the performance he decided to hand the part over to ex-colleague Lee Serle. “I’ve created a few works now where I’ve been in the show… I started doing it for this one and went, ‘For once, I need to sit outside of it and just make it, because it’s getting too confusing”.
After graduating from VCA, Perry went on to work with then-budding troupe Chunky Move for six years, before freelancing with such prestigious companies and choreographers as Balletlab, Lucy Guerin, DV8 Physical Theatre, Force Majeure and Kage. During this time, Perry tried to gain experience in as many modes of performance as possible, all of which inform the unique style of contemporary dance which he practices today.
Double Think is the first show that Perry has directed and choreographed on his own, after co-creating I Like This with Antony Hamilton in 2008. Originally made for Chunky Move’s Next Move program, the duo recently took I Like This to Dublin for the Fringe Festival. Both shows share a similar deconstruction of the performance process, drawing attention to the highly orchestrated nature of the medium.
According to Perry, contemporary dance has become much more intellectual and self-reflexive in recent years – a shift that he, for one, embraces. “When I first started…it was all about dance as a language – you made phrases and you cut them up and you abstracted them or you put filters on them…I haven’t been working with people that make things quite like that anymore. It’s much more an investigation of ourselves, and our interaction with each other in this mode of performing”.
Rather than genre, it is the central concept of oppositions that unites Double Think, playing with binaries of light and dark, of silence and noise, and of movement and stillness. “What we’ve done is tried to apply it on as many levels as possible,” explains Perry. “The show actually jumps all over the shop, from miniature sound and light shows, to large scale object puppetry, through to more traditional contemporary dance and spoken word”.
The two dancers manipulate the set while they perform, which houses roughly 50 per cent of the lighting. Byron’s idiosyncratic visual language can be tied to his ongoing interest in photography, which he also practices. “I like that onstage lighting can really focus and almost provide things like the zoom in, or the medium close up,” says Perry. “The fact that you’re revealing how something is operated doesn’t unweave the rainbow. For me, it adds more magic…The illusion still exists, but you can see that they’re happening live and you can see the work that it takes for those things to be presented to you”.
Perry has also worked with Luke Smiles on sound design, an old friend whom he met while both were studying dance at VCA. Those who saw Gabrielle Nankivell’s I Left My Shoes On Warm Concrete And Walked In The Rain earlier this year will be sure to recall Smiles’ work – a three dimensional soundscape so rich and complex it acted like a character in the performance.
Perry will be taking Double Think to Adelaide in February for the Australian Performing Arts Market, and hopes to eventually tour the show regionally. But with two weeks until opening night, getting through this intensive period of rehearsals is Perry’s number one priority.
“I’m still sort of in panic mode,” he laughs, “and I think that’s fine!
