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On the floor of a rehearsal hall in Rushcutters Bay a dancer is unfurling her body, looping slowly through a series of sinuous movements – but for one rigid arm. This arm, which she wrangles like a robotic attachment, looks to be holding an invisible phone. She strikes a pose and smiles.
This is one part of Hustle Harder, a new work by Berlin-based Australian choreographer Adam Linder, which is now being presented as a durational performance exhibition all day, every day for a month at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA).
Choreographer Adam Linder has worked in theatre and museum spaces.Credit: Clemens Habicht
“I wanted to develop a unique choreographic vocabulary that was imbued with the agency that individuals have to capture and record their experience of what they’re seeing,” Linder explains.
“With this work I’m starting from this idea of images, and how the reproduction of images and the circulation of images is changing museum practice, both for the museums and the visitors.”
Anyone who has been in the mirrored lift at the MCA or posed for a selfie with the gleaming Lindy Lee sculpture on the museum’s Circular Quay forecourt probably understands what he’s speaking about. It’s certainly something museums have been thinking about for some time.
“Over the last 20 years, public engagement with the space of the museum has been entirely transformed,” MCA director Suzanne Cotter, who commissioned Linder, reflects.
“Big projects such as Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commissions have helped that idea of the museum as public space, which is an idea that people working in museums and artists have been thinking about for much longer. But for it to actually start to become embedded in the way people think about going to a museum and engaging with it, I think it’s really shifted a lot.”
Cotter acknowledges the huge role that social media has also played in this development. “It’s an incredible agent in terms of people curating the way they see themselves in the world … I find it a really wonderful thing because it suggests that people feel like [the museum is] a space where they can freely do that. And the fact that artists are responding to that, wanting to speak to that, sets up a whole other set of interesting conversations.”
In MCA’s double-height Macgregor Gallery, nine dancers interchangeably move through the space in a series of mise-en-scenes that unfold like an algorithm. Moments are prompted by decisions made and intuited by the group, working with particular styles of movement – popping and stuttering limbs; robotic processing of sensory surroundings – and invisible parameters that might relate to space or time. No two hours are the same and no two days will be the same.
Alice Heyward, Taos Bertrand, Bec Jensen, Ivey Wawn perform in Hustle Harder.Credit: Clemens Habicht
As a dancer and choreographer, Linder has created work around the world for both theatres and museums, and while these works share many motivations and sensibilities, his approaches to these alternate contexts lean on different ideas and modes of performance.
“The structure of the work, the way the performers in this work Hustle Harder are unfolding the dramaturgy and the composition over a one-month exhibition, it’s a completely different structural approach to how I would work on stage,” he says. “Calling it a performance exhibition is really about the category of its construction and how it’s being done.”
Back in the rehearsal room, Linder is building the work with the dancers. “I tend to come with quite specific interests or seeds or ideas and I will give prompts or set tasks, and I’ll offer these problems, and then we’ll experiment and play them out,” he explains.
“A lot of this is feeding back on how the individual is processing those ideas in their body and us watching another individual and being like, ‘Oh, OK, you’re doing it like that. Well, I could take some of that information, integrate that into my body, but then I’m going to share this…’ So there’s a kind of shared relay and cause-and-effect in the way information is moving through the room.”
While the dancers are moving and responding to each other, they are also working with eight mobile partitions that replicate elements of the MCA building – from the colourful bathroom doors to the ceiling (replete with lighting track, smoke alarm and security camera), to the store and mirrored elevator. Three partitions carry works from the gallery’s collection.
“I wanted to create a maquette of all aspects of the museum because a lot of images are made in all these interstitial architectural spaces. And then it made sense to involve art works,” says Linder. The works he chose are a Tracey Moffatt photograph, a Hany Armanious sculpture and a video work by Agatha Gothe-Snape.
Bec Jensen and Taos Bertrand perform in Hustle Harder, as a screen shows Agatha Gothe-Snape’s video work, FEELINGS.Credit: Clemens Habicht
“The MCA Collection is very idiosyncratic,” Linder continues. “There’s a lot that it really covers and then lots of things it doesn’t. With these three works it was really just me being drawn to their practices. If I’m going to invite these works into my work, then I want to have a feeling about them. They cross different practices, but they all really have a stake in the contemporary.
“I think the tension is that these artworks in the piece, they’re in motion and in some ways will take a more prominent place than they might do in a stationary exhibition, but at the same time, they’re also just props.”
Hustle Harder is Cotter’s first commission as MCA’s director. While she was not thinking of it in those terms when she approached Linder, the work does inaugurate a new way of thinking about programming at the MCA. “We want to introduce a new dynamic that is a counterpoint to the bigger international art shows and more conventional styles of exhibition-making,” she says.
“There’s also a history of dance and performance that has been really generative for artists in thinking about their practice and expanding it that way; we’re continuing that in a contemporary moment.”
Linder and Cotter are both looking forward to seeing how visitors respond to Hustle Harder and reflect on the idea of themselves as spectators, both in and of the work.
Linder says: “It’s different to the theatre, where you walk in and know that you have a seat from a specific vantage point. But I think that’s the nature of a performance exhibition, of the real, distinct attributes of the museum as opposed to the theatre – that the viewer chooses how they conduct their own experience of it.”
Hustle Harder is at the Museum of Contemporary Art until August 20.
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