Current

There is a moment when the human body becomes unfamiliar.

Not monstrous. Not transformed. Simply moving without any obvious human reason for the movement.

This is the strange country of Current, Sydney Dance Company’s new work, where bodies seem to have slipped slightly out of the world we recognise. They jerk, recoil, accelerate, fold into one another and suddenly become still, their extraordinary physical control producing something closer to unease than virtuosity.

At times it feels as though Terminator has wandered into Mad Max, though neither survives quite intact.

There is something post-apocalyptic here, but no apocalypse needs to occur. The world already feels emptied out. What remains is movement: bodies organising themselves, colliding, submitting, asserting, gathering and dispersing according to impulses that seem only partly their own.

Animal, machine, pack, organism.

The dancers become difficult to locate.

And yet they are beautiful, which makes the violence more disturbing. It is not disorder that we are watching but something highly organised, almost ceremonial. The body has become an exquisite instrument whose purpose we can no longer quite discern.

From close quarters the distinction between choreography and behaviour begins to dissolve. A gesture looks rehearsed, then instinctive; mechanical, then strangely vulnerable. One body appears to command another. Another seems to submit before the command has been given.

The question is no longer what the movement means, but what kind of world could produce bodies like these.

Perhaps this is the current.

Not simply a flow, but a force passing through bodies that cannot see where it comes from or where it is taking them.

There is no reassuring movement towards transcendence. Nothing is redeemed. The kinetic world simply persists, as though meaning were something that belonged to an earlier species.

And this is where Current becomes an Unsettled Place.

The unsettling possibility is not that we are looking at a post-human world, but that the post-human was already inside the human: the compulsive body, the obedient body, the collective body, the body that moves before consciousness has caught up.

For a while, watching from the darkness, you begin to wonder whether the dancers are becoming machines or whether the machines have merely revealed something ancient about us.

Then a face appears.

A glance. A hesitation. Something almost tender.

You recognise the person again — or think you do.

The moment passes.

What remains is movement, and the uneasy suspicion that we may never have known quite what was moving.

NOTITIA

Unsettled Places is a series about the places — in cinema, art, dreams, music and ordinary life — where something familiar becomes slightly strange, and where meaning hovers without quite declaring itself.