It could be the question of the year. What, if anything, is real? Blinded by the blizzard of the now – AI, deep fakes, opinion paraded as fact – we may be tempted to regard this conundrum as entirely modern. But we would be misled, for the human animal is a veteran fantasist.
Every culture is both an invention and an inventor. Myth maker, storyteller. Deities, demons, designer chic. It is perhaps no surprise that we have created countless confections rooted in that most immediate of all forms: the body.
For Melanie Lane, multi-awarded choreographer and lifelong dancer, the mythic body is fertile ground. In particular, the oft-idealised female form. Across time and location, it has populated the realm of folkloric fantasy.
“Whether it’s the witch or the fairy, the nymph or the siren…I wanted to unpack where they came from,” she begins.
Hence, Phantasm, her latest full-length work (set to open this August at the Chunky Move Studio in Melbourne). “So, we’re talking about the supernatural feminine, whether it’s monstrous or sort of beyond our reality; and looking at the female body through that lens.”
Born in Sydney, but raised in both European and Javanese traditions, Lane has always surfed the spaces between cultures. Phantasm extends this arc, exploring the mythologised feminine and “trying to look at a spectrum of what those figures have been in quite a lot of contexts. Not just folklore, but dance.”
Indeed, working in dance, with its long history of idealisation and body perfectionism, gives her both the canvas and the colours. With these tools, the aim is to tease apart our enduring fascination with abstracted (unrealistic?) bodies. Specifically, four dancers – Nikki Tarling, Rachel Coulson, Ashley McClellan, and Georgia Rudd – will embody the various fantasy figures, mythic and choreographic.
“It’s an objectified, almost perfect, distilled, young, pretty ideal,” Lane observes of her artform’s penchant for flawless physicality. “Of course, in ballet you see this a lot. There’s the ballet blanc thing, where the nymph figure, or the fairy or the ghost became really prevalent. But also, in pop culture, the cheerleader.”
The next question is obvious. How are Lane and her quartet approaching this? “What’s interesting about these stories is that there can be different ways of speaking to them,” she answers. “One is obviously to kind of resist, but actually what is more interesting is to lean into them and reinvent what it is to be a witch or a vampire or a cheerleader.”
Thus, Phantasm seeks to do more than represent the blunt binaries of standard gender polemic. As its creator elaborates, “We’re reinhabiting the myths…using these figures as vessels to move through. Almost like they were superpowers, in a way. And that’s been an interesting way to shapeshift through these bodies, rather than rejecting them.”
Just as folkloric forms come clothed in assumption – frequently sexualised and/or framed in crude psychological and political terms – so too they offer a clearly identifiable dance palette. Here again, Lane is opting to engage.
“We’re leaning into the tropes and seeing where they take us,” she reveals. “Without giving away too much, I think the journey through these figures is like a way to return to the body in its purest form. That sounds a bit abstract in a way, but it’s almost like each of these figures is a costume, and so it’s like peeling away until we come back to the skin. To the blood, to the flesh.”
In this spirit, Lane tries to encapsulate the work and its creative process. “It’s the idea of what’s seen and what’s unseen.”
At this point, the 2017 Keir Choreographic Award winner (and 2023/24 Chunky Move choreographer-in-residence) draws breath. Switches focus. Imagines a room full of people. As she says, Phantasm aims to keep audiences guessing, wondering if what they are seeing is real or not.
“I like to make work that doesn’t really give any answers but gives a lot to chew on,” she states.
Here, her voice lightens, grounding the previous remark. “You know, I come from a family of a lot of very superstitious culture — like Javanese culture,” she adds. “So yeah, there’s often this kind of slippery space between what is real and what is not.”
By addressing the mythic feminine through the agency of four real women, and doing so in the avowedly figurative language of contemporary dance, Lane knows that she is playing with a potent, possibly catalytic blend of reality, perception, and aestheticised representation. With a hint of gentle self-mockery, she confesses that, for this reason and others, her upcoming work will be hard to pin precisely. Yet, in the end, as she suggests, “It will be something.”
Quite what, as ever, remains unresolved; however desperate we may be to extract the real from the white noise of information.
Real? Unreal? Both? Neither? Or maybe simply phantasmagorical.
For tickets and more information, visit chunkymove.com/works/phantasm.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
