Presenting an explorational, transcendent dance performance for RISING Festival, singer-artist-dancer Marcus Whale’s “Ecstasy” provided just what its evocative title promised.
In an arresting, physically annihilating performance that incorporated song, dance and an extreme range of stillness and frenetic action, the Sydney-based performer took his audience on a pseudo-religious experience at multi-artform venue The Substation.
Interpreting the themes of his 2024 album Ecstasy into a 70-minute live performance work, the show follows Marcus in a series of performative rituals that rise in manic energy, as he becomes increasingly possessed by a some kind of higher power. This upward ascension, both in body and in spirit, is the fulfilment of the work’s ecstatic title, with some passages literally adopting the zen-like euphoria of ingesting ecstasy or other mood-altering narcotics.
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Throughout the show, the stage design is harsh, rapid and dazzling, with a heavy deployment of strobe lighting that in some instances proves as much a feat of endurance as the radical flexing and leaping undertaken by Marcus onstage.
It’s the moments in which the lighting becomes dynamic and shadow the spiralling motions of Marcus’s dancing that the experience achieves its most affecting and immersive quality. Here we can fully engage with the precision of Marcus’s movement and appreciate the extremes of physical discipline he masters, being able to perform at such a high level of exertion for prolonged periods.
Marcus presents an incredibly athletic, poised form onstage, clad in progressively minimal costuming until one passage in which he throws himself across the stage, as though possessed by spiritual ecstasy, wearing nothing but a high-watt flashlight attached to his head.
The pulsing techno beat of Marcus’s Ecstasy album provides a compelling soundscape to the beguiling, muscular performance, in a show that proudly embodies the brave and subversive acts that RISING festival exists to showcase.
Marcus Whale continues to release new music and perform at venues across Australia. To keep up-to-date with his future live music and digital release schedule, view his personal website.
