Restless Dance Theatre was privileged to be programmed in Melbourne’s RISING Festival in June this year. It’s an event made by and for Melbourne, so to have an Adelaide presence in a uniquely, specifically Melbourne focused event is quite something. It was at RISING where Restless Dance Theatre presented its first coproduction with Chunky Move’s Antony Hamilton, Rewards for the Tribe.
But the show didn’t stop in Melbourne! The company is in the UK now with Rewards for the Tribe, performing at the Warwick Arts Centre before the show comes to Adelaide in late October at The Odeon
We asked company member Michael Hodyl to give us insight into the production’s various elements and his perspective as an artist. Hodyl is currently on tour with Rewards for the Tribe in the UK, before it opens in Adelaide late October. Hodyl offers a rather busy, in your face description leaving no doubt this work is an intriguing must see. Not a typical work to be expected from Restless Dance Theatre.
Q&A with Michael Hodyl
What can we expect? “Well, it is very different to all the shows. We dance with objects, obviously they are attached to us. A lot of dance and strobe lights.”
Describe what it is like working with Chunky Move’s Antony Hamilton? “He is very fun to work with. Very fun. He loves energy, loads of energy.” For, Hodyl Hamilton’s “loads of energy” is something he readily adds to as part of the creative challenge of the work. “I adapt to his energy and style,” also noting his own solo, a favourite moment encapsulates the tricky business of Hamilton’s quest to divine the difference between the idea of human perfection in art, and reality. “There is a lot of technique, a lot of transfer of weight,” adding cryptically “and you might see some magic hands.”
The best think about being on tour? Being on tour is a heady thing for a young artist and Hodyl is lapping it up, the good and not so good. “The best thing about touring is the experience. It’s about seeing and exploring new things and being adventurous.”
The not so best about being on tour? “Missing family, they miss you, but you are busy dancing. You can get tired, not much down time. That’s the only hard bit.”
About Rewards for the Tribe
Antony Hamilton is famed for exploring big questions through dance concerned with how the world seems to work and the fantastical. For Rewards for the Tribe, he wanted to consider ‘is there such a thing as utopia by design? An ideal of perfection as the old masters of art saw it in their vision of divine geometry, against the essentially not so ‘divine’ chaotic, ordinary and diversely misshapen reality we are in the world.
Rewards for the Tribe tackles that discord head on. How do bodies stack up to the ideal when an attempt is made to fit the criteria of a divine geometry?
An attempt is made by five dancers – each their own unique shape and natural forms – as they build up and crumble wildly disparate series of forms, shapes and tableaux’s attempting ‘perfection’ in repeated struggles to answer the question about utopia by design, using Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ as but one guide.
Can it be answered? Is there something to be rediscovered about our selves, our common humanity by trying get beyond this geometry of perfection?
Watch Rewards for the Tribe in development for RISING Festival
Book here! See Restless Dance Company Dance present their truest and unfiltered selves on stage in Rewards for the Tribe. The Odeon 26 – 29 October.