Reaching for connection in age of isolation

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Resource Text: Review
Title Reaching for connection in age of isolation
Creator Contributors
Abstract/Description Flux Job - which sounds like something a plumber would perform on your pipes - is a new entry into the burgeoning genre of theatre about the desolations of life in lockdown. Created by choreographer and director Lucy Guerin, it's a pessimistic reflection - what else? - on social isolation and the limits of resilience in the age of perpetual crisis. The first part reproduces those familiar disjunctive rhythms - and the attendant frustrations - of video group chats: the awkward hesitations and the lack of emotional connection. The four dancers - Amber McCartney, Geoffrey Watson, Lilian Steiner and Tra Mi Dinh - drift around the stage, each fixed in a small square of light, spasming outward and recoiling. It goes on like that for some time. Then, just when you think you can't bear another minute of erratic wafting, the work shifts into clear and emphatic unison dance. This section, with its severe lighting and heavy drums, reads like a somewhat bombastic comment on the strict laws and dynamic of social conformism associated with the pandemic response. Abstract movement then gives way to theatricality as the dancers begin to apply old-age make-up while talking in a stagey but relatively sympathetic way about their personal fears and anxieties. The trick with the make-up works well. The dancers really do seem to age before our eyes as the physical burden of living through a time of emergency manifests in wrinkles and streaks of grey. It is now 20 years since Lucy Guerin formed her own dance company. Across the decades, she has often pointed to the weirder and gloomier impacts of technology on society. Flux Job reuses many of the images and devices that featured in those earlier works, but there is also something new here: a post-lockdown desire for direct connection.
Related Events
  • Flux Job, Arts House North Melbourne Town Hall, North Melbourne, VIC, 16 March 2022
Source The Age, Francis Cooke, South Melbourne, Vic, 1854
Item URL
Page 20
Date Issued 18 March 2022
Language English
Citation Andrew Fuhrmann, Reaching for connection in age of isolation, The Age, 18 March 2022, 20
Data Set AusStage
Resource Identifier 78424