REVIEW: STRUT Dance presents 'Schreibstück' @ PICA

As posted on the Arts Hub website. By Rachael McHardy-Kostusik Five choreographers, three choreographic teams, twelve dancers, three performances and one stage. WA’s peak body for independent choreography, STRUT dance, recently hosted the Australian premiere of Thomas Lehmen`s, Schreibstück at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. The season ran from March 20-22nd to sold out shows. Perth was privy to the first Australian performances. The remarkable thing about choreographer Thomas Lehmen is that he didn’t generate any choreography for Schreibstück. He simply provided a script for four choreographers to interpret, following rules set down by this script. The European countries that have completed their own versions of Schreibstück were under strict instructions to use three choreographers, with three dancers in each version. Once choreographed, all three versions are staged in a staggered fashion. However the Australian dancers broke a few rules, being true Aussies. They decided to have four choreographers instead of three. Berlin based Thomas Lehmen is celebrated in the dance world for pushing boundaries and creating original contemporary performance, producing work that is refreshing and inspiring for audiences. The preview of Schreibstück including Bianca Martin’s version (1) was extremely well received last year to sell out shows at the Chapel space, North Perth. In both the 2007 preview and the 2008 premiere dancers Jonathan Buckels, Katrina Lazaroff and Brooke Leeder are brilliantly versatile, talented and polished performers with a knack for comic gesture. Version 2 and 3 were enmeshed with version 1 for the 2008 premiere. Sete Tele and Rachel Ogle’s version (2) featured dancers with Down Syndrome as part of the WA Government’s Disability and the Arts Inclusion Initiative. These two acclaimed Perth choreographers have an extraordinary capacity for choreography and many years of experience working with dancers with disabilities. Aimee Smith’s version (3) consisted of three women cast of skilled and energetic dancers, including Sally Blatchford, Paea Leach and Aisling Donovan. Each version together was a clever mish mash of styles, offered on a platter of three versions, from breakdance freezes, hip-hop, dance theatre, gesture to contemporary dance. Bianca Martin and Aimee Smith are choreographers at the forefront of a talented cluster of emerging to newly established dance artists. Countless subjects are convincingly enacted with subtle gesture and athletic sequences of ‘thinking’, ‘love’, ‘existing’, ‘sex’ and ‘dying’, were choreographed in one-minute sequences with five-second intervals. There is mostly no music and few props. Lighting is very basic with the light flooding the stage. Dialogue is frequently allowed, and the sequences are timed with a stop watch by dancers. Particular areas of the stage at times corresponded to particular areas of the script, sometimes they were ‘thinking ‘at the front stage left and enacting ‘sex’ downstage centre and ‘dying’ upstage left. It was an organized mix-up of trajectories with regular starting and stopping. The rules of the game are explained to the audience at the beginning with interjections of personal thoughts of the dancers throughout. Another unique aspect of this performance is that the dancers also contribute their own choreography and choreograph for each other, as each sequence is performed it is introduced. For example a dancer would announce “Written by... choreographed by...” prior to performing the sequence. Schreibstück has been performed across Europe since its premiere in 2002. The Australian version premiering this year was a unique version to its European counterparts in that the SRUT choreographers broke some of the rules including adding music here and there. In Version 2 they used two choreographers and six dancers. Structurally it was very much like a score of music with a set rhythm and carefully considered repetitions. It built up to a crescendo of sounds, words and movement with all dancers on stage revealing humorous yet organized chaos, representative of life.