Chunky Move have been pushing, probing and stretching outside of the status quo since its inception in 1995. With Antony Hamilton at the helm, this trend hasn’t slowed or been impeded. Their new work 4/4 - formulated, directed and choreographed by Hamilton - is about to be on show.
From Tuesday August 8 to Saturday August 12, the Malthouse Theatre will be taken over by the minimalist design and rugged street aesthetics of 4/4. Eight dancers will take to the stage adorned in unrefined street-inspired attire, moving in precise, crystalline motion.
Repurposing the industrial expanse of the Merlyn Theatre, the choreographic precision and minimalism will weave its way through quartets and duets fusing and dissembling in enthralling arrangements.
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Artistic Director Antony Hamilton has conceived this particular performance from a more technical approach to movement and dance. However, that isn’t to say that the process of constructing 4/4 hasn’t cultivated a narrative that now has the show sitting in its full form ready to be shared.
“There are these streams of work that I’m fascinated in, which is much more about the technical,” says Antony. “It’s much more about the practice of being a dancer, with something more grounded and rooted to movement and the exploration of that rather than narrative or narrative dramaturgy.
“One of the interesting things though, is that no matter how technical you try and make a work or how much you try to make it solely an exercise in choreography, it always seems to emerge into some sort of dramaturgic final production, it’s really impossible to avoid it. That’s one of the most fascinating things about live performance.
“No matter how technical you try and make something. It always transcends and it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.”
“It becomes this expressive vehicle with the dramaturgy emerging from the materials rather than the dramaturgy imposing itself on a performance from its genesis.”
What makes 4/4 even more special is the soundscape that accompanies it. Renowned sound designer Alisdair Macindoe is responsible for this component of 4/4, a collaborative relationship between Macindoe and Hamilton that began many moons ago, born out of the pursuit of creating a new movement language.
“Alisdair and I developed this approach to making sound about 10 years ago, maybe more than 10 years ago now,” he says. “We started generating random number sequences that we spit out by writing numbers on separate pages. We basically made these long lists of numbers and then those numbers just essentially determined rhythmic patterns that we follow for a duration of movement. It becomes very particular, very idiosyncratic and a unique way of making choreography.”
The particularity of the metronomic sound composition plays a vital role in the performance. Not only at times is the sound informing the movement, but vice versa, as well as the two existing and creating simultaneously, almost like the abyssal depths of a jazz band jam.
“We certainly have a score that is composed in tandem alongside of the choreography,” says Antony. “We’ve been composing the score and the choreography simultaneously. There’s steps and it all goes back and forth a little bit like one time we will agree we need another minute of this particular number or rhythm for the score. We have latched onto a timing sequence and then we’ve developed a bit of choreography for it. Or sometimes we’ve made the choreography first, but it tends to be very chronological, and we work very sequentially from the beginning.”
With all elements of the performance set to collide in a paradoxical variability of harmony and discord, the echoes of the complexity of dance and movement will be on full display.
Prior to stepping into the role as Artistic Director at Chunky Move almost five years ago, Hamilton has been a dancer nearly all his life so he remains acutely realistic about how audiences interpret his work.
“I’ve discovered over the course of making work over the last 20 or so years is that you’re truly only half the performance,” he says. “You’re the half that is the presentation. You make the thing and you put it into the context that you present it and the other half is the audience. They’re the other half because their interpretation is its own kind of reality, and it is its own truth. The more space inside it, the more that interpretation can come to the fore.”
In addition to this realisation, Antony understands that with less of a distinct narrative and intention comes a much broader and deeper interpretation for audiences, almost as if audiences can engage with the breadth of their agency.
“The other thing I’ve realised, and I think it’s been a fantastic learning journey as a maker of art, is that the more it is, the more people seem to be able to find much deeper meaning in the work. They tend to find things that are much more universally resonant about life and the entire experience of life when there isn’t a strongly imposed position on things.”
For Antony, creative expression and the art of constructing rich and imaginative dance narratives have always gone hand in hand with his profound dedication to mastering the technical aspects of dance.
“I feel a little bit like this sense of creative exploration and imaginative world building has always run parallel with this interest in the highly technical approach to the mastery of dance,” he says. “I studied classical ballet for a very long time and parallel to that I was breakdancing. It was the early days of breakdancing, 1985 when I first started. I was messing around when I was only 8 years old, chopping and breaking.
“Both of those dance forms are highly technical and very much about mastering skills and tricks. They are very presentational, very forward and certainly not introspective, they’re outward facing. That technical mastery of those dance forms was something as a younger dancer that really drove me.
“But almost in parallel to that my creative work draws upon my creativity and imagination I had as a child. I try and hold on to as much of that as I can because that period in time was so rich when I was a child unbound to political or social contexts. You’re not even thinking within contexts.”
As conceptual creativity and dance technicality continue to coalesce for Antony Hamilton and the crew at Chunky Move, 4/4 is a dance production that is absolutely worth attending.
Grab your tickets to 4/4 here.
This article was made in partnership with Chunky Move.
