Miss Universal had its beginnings in collaboration between Eke, dancers Annabelle Balharry, Chloe Chignell and Angela Goh, along with visual artist/sculptor Claire Lambe at Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Space in 2014. “The collaboration with Claire Lambe found us infecting each other’s thoughts and ideas about what we could use in the space,” says Eke. “Miss Universal is a result of lots of collaboration – lots of asking ‘what’s happening?’ It’s intense. After the collaboration at Gertrude Street we wanted to keep questioning and working together on whether or not it’s possible for dance and sculpture to exist together in a theatrical space.” Miss Universal comprises the same four dancers who worked with Atlanta on the earlier project and Claire Lambe is responsible for set and costume design. Being in the Chunky Move studio, Eke says, has allowed this work to evolve much further in dimension than what was possible at Gertrude St, especially when it comes to lighting. The dancers move through a landscape of images, sculpture and transformative material, in a space where the lighting, by lighting designer Matthew Adey, holds its own as a metaphor for love. “Light affects the space; it has a metaphoric association,” Eke says. “We’ve been able to create architecture of space.”
Eke was the recipient of Dance House’s inaugural Keir Choreographic Award in 2014. She talks about her process in terms of creating relationships between bodies, between bodies and space, between performer and audience, rather than designing a set of moves. Surprisingly, the practice of jelly wrestling informed this work’s beginnings. “Claire did jelly wrestling in Japan,” Eke says. “At Gertrude Street we wanted to try wrestling; Claire wanted to use jelly in the space. We compromised and put jelly on the windows.” Four women wrestling each other could almost invite a prurient curiosity from an audience, considering that the piece is titled Miss Universal, suggestive of a beauty contest. “It doesn’t have that voyeuristic element,” Eke assures us. “As a group it didn’t feel as though we were objectifying anyone. If we are sensual together it comes from friendship. There is no opportunity to be sexualized; this doesn’t have the opportunity to become sex.”
Eke says that the dancers rehearsed without speaking to each other. Were there moments where things got a bit dangerous? How do you define choreography without words? “There were four hours of rehearsal where we navigated the space without speaking,” she says. “It was a physical investigation and we used other sensibilities to navigate space, other logic, rather than the linear conscious decision-making thing. At one stage we thought we were going to have to do jiu-jitsu classes. By the second rehearsal we were developing our own technique, had named our own technique. We thought about the idea of ‘wrestling to win?’ What does that mean? The requirements to win involve a locking situation. For it to end someone was going to have to be locked. Whoever was going to be locked had to decide to submit, be passive. We wrestle with care. We never find the lock, and we never stop moving. In order to sustain any lock we become one giant form through the building of technique, through moving, we make a formal shape, a centipede, a worm, a doughnut. Later on in the process we became more comfortable with formalizing movement. The four of us are moving, moving as an entangled form, limbs and bodies forming one brain, one stomach, one organ making the decisions. There’s one organ between the four of us. It’s an interesting experiment, working out what thing to stop, what thing to continue.”
Although Eke talks about the development of Miss Universal in terms of the physical, there are intellectual influences involved, to do with almost opposing feminist stances from Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (positing that advances of science in the 16th century have set back the cause of women) to Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (using the metaphor of a cyborg to urge feminists to move beyond the limitations of traditional gender),and Monique Wittig’s Les Guerilleres (about a war of the sexes, where women engage in bloody, victorious battles),all in the interests of askingwhether any type of universality is possible within contemporary social structures.
Along with startling images and directions, Eke’s work is often hilarious, unintentionally so, according to her. “There’s a surprising amount of laughter in rehearsal,” she says. “I don’t know if it translates into the work. It’s not a great way to make a decision, so the humour is not intentional. It’s the absurdity of it all; we don’t take ourselves seriously.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
