Dance Massive 3-15 March 2009

Splintergroup is an evolving group of creator/directors whose philosophy is to give over personal investment in favour of a completely collaborative relationship. For lawn the core group of choreographer/performers are Vincent Crowley, Grayson Millwood and Gavin Webber; for roadkill the group comprises Sarah-Jayne Howard, Millwood and Webber. According to Webber - also Artistic Director of Townsville's Dancenorth - another key tenet is that change is essential to the life of the work. "Once we have stopped changing things," says Webber, "it is time to stop performing the work."

lawn's initial development took place in a gymnasium behind an old school in East Berlin, "under dark German winter skies". Millwood, Crowley and Webber were living, says Webber, in unrenovated GDR-era apartments, and were experiencing the daily life of a city that had been "at the centre of some of history's darkest episodes". All three had recently worked on the stage version of David Lynch's Lost Highway. "Not surprisingly, all of this - winter, Berlin and Lynch - kept creeping out of our collective subconscious and into our show," says Webber.

"In some ways lawn is a simple fish-out-of-water story," he says. "It's about the feeling you get at the end of your first February in Berlin with no end in sight to winter, Vitamin D levels dangerously depleted due to three hours of sun per day, and not understanding why you are so depressed, lonely and lethargic."

"It's also about history - the histories of the rooms we inhabit, clothes we wear, books we read, appliances we use and the people who've lived in, worn, used, thrown out and discarded these places and things before us. It's about the ghosts that surround us and the layers of human existence beneath our feet."

"In Berlin these histories are piled up one on top of the other," says Webber. "Jammed underneath cobblestones and bricks, behind the walls and in between layers of wallpaper and coats of paint."

Both lawn and roadkill delve into dark and surreal emotional landscapes - lawn's apartment setting is at times (literally) suffocating, while roadkill's protagonists deal with an unsettling, remote locale where nothing is ever quite certain.


roadkill

"We are dealing with perceptions of these spaces," says Webber. "Either the inside of a Berlin apartment or an Australian desert landscape - that occur in the minds of the characters. The physical vocabulary is developed from [the characters'] paranoias and desires. We use movement because we love its abstraction. We use it to travel from a concrete world into a dream."

Urban myths and backpacker murders - particularly that of British traveller Peter Falconio - were a source of inspiration for roadkill. Webber, Grayson Millwood and Sarah-Jane Howard also spent a week in the desert west of Townsville, "looking at the sky, playing with torches, listening to nothing".

In roadkill, says Webber, what's ‘out there' also occurs in the minds of the characters. "There is an intended blurring of the lines of reality, where one thing occurs and can go in various directions."

"We were more interested in the mystery than the solutions. There were so many suspicions and rumours that surrounded the Peter Falconio case and people are more fascinated with uncertainty than with perfect solutions. So we treat the story as a linear path that gets fractured into many possibilities."

Analogies with film technique play a part in the structuring of roadkill, with the group also using theatrical devices, including sound, to inject tension into the work.

"We wanted to edit scenes like you would a movie, but do so in a physical way. We made cross-fades, wipe edits, snaps..."

"One of the things we are very proud of is that people find roadkill scary. It's not very often you can frighten an audience, especially in dance."

roadkill is not only emotionally ‘scary' - it verges on the physically dangerous.

"We are always interested in playing with real physical risk on stage. It gives an immediacy and authenticity to the movement and involves the audience in a live event. We don't hide the danger. It's no accident that we fill the space with stones and then do the most intense movement of the piece."

All the choreographer/performers in lawn and roadkill have spent considerable time touring and living outside Australia. For Webber, this mobility serves to engender a greater awareness and fascination with this country, allowing him to see more clearly "the quirky nature of things".

"When you are living overseas you tend to develop a rosy view of your home country. You see this happening in Australia with communities that retain the traditions and routines of their homelands. I know Italian friends who have visited Australia and said that the Italian communities here are sometimes more Italian than Italy. It's natural, but also unreal. The place you left is not the same as the place you remember."

Both lawn and roadkill are distinctly ‘Australian' pieces, says Webber.

"Our Australian identity is very clear and strong in all the work we have done, whether that is in Australia or in Europe. In Germany we are constantly being asked about the humour in our work, the ironical play that we use in very serious situations. I think this is a very Australian quality - to take something very seriously and be able to undercut it with humour in the same moment."

roadkill is at Arts House, Meat Market, from Thursday 5 to Sunday 8 March