Hullapolloi, a collaboration between Jo Randerson and Kate McIntosh, commissioned by Footnote Dance, returns to Toi Whakaari this weekend for a short season before touring overseas.  If you can get along to it, you should – this is a rare high quality, genre-busting work that is both experimental and entertaining.

Five dancers – Lucy Marinkovich, Emily Adams, Manu Reynaud, Olivia McGregor, Levi Cameron – present a wordless narrative that charts group dynamics in an age of individualism and consumerism.  The story is told through movement and symbolism, rather than words. The five performers are entirely clad in different coloured lycra bodysuits that completely obscure every part of their body, including their faces.  They communicate by noises and touch.

The group starts off leaderless, their movements largely synchronised and matching.  They cooperate and collaborate in work and play.  Due to a lack of self-consciousness, I wondered if this was meant to represent people (or other human like creatures) in an innocent, childlike state, although it is open to a number of interpretations.  At this point, although the performers all wear different coloured suits, they seem less like distinct individuals and more like parts of a whole.

Regardless of what meaning you place on the initial group dynamic, it is not long until it begins to change towards self-centred and self conscious behaviour.  As the performers begin to both literally and figuratively consume the paper objects placed in piles around the stage by placing objects under the ‘skin’ of their lycra suits they become more competitive. Exchange of objects begins as mutual trade, but degenerates into theft and greedy accumulation of far more objects than one person needs.  The ‘bodies’ of the performers become more distorted the more they consume.

It was at this point in the work that I began to conceive of each performer as an individual character: the olive character driven to breaking point by over-consumption; the blue character who assists green with the monopolising of objects; and the more playful brown and orange characters, who align as the ‘have-nots’.  As distinct as each character becomes, the performers are unified in their amazing ability to convey a huge range of emotions and tones – all with their faces obscured. 

Randerson and McIntosh engage with a wide range of themes, whilst refusing to provide any clear messages. Because of this the work is refreshingly open to interpretation and can remain playful rather than didactic. The work also eludes any attempt to define it as ‘dance’ or ‘theatre’. It is a richly layered production where sound, movement, objects and light combine to produce an experience that is both other-worldly and yet recognisably human.

On reflection I found myself wondering about the significance of the title, the multiple possible interpretations, the colour choices and more. The carefully selected details of this work were a real stand out for me. Hullapolloi is an excellent work that manages to be both enjoyably engaging and thought provoking. Get to it while you can. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

This year Footnote Dance tour the South Island with the full length work Hullapolloi, rather than their usual mixed bill. Hullapolloi is a playful, object-focussed work from theatre-makers Kate McIntosh and Jo Randerson.

Six performers dressed from the tip of their heads to their feet in skin-tight, stretch lycra come on stage and manipulate materials drawn from five piles. These are a collection of slightly broken down, grey cardboard tubes, an upright roll of butchers’ paper from which sheafs may be torn, a pile of newspapers, a collection of cardboard egg trays, and an assortment of disposable cardboard cups. 

The dramaturgical armature of the performance is fairly straight forward. The performers move in broad unison, mostly enacting simple repetitive and somewhat ritualised acts (bending down with the upper body horizontal and then jumping or shuffling a few paces forward before returning to standing and moving on, and so on). In between, one or more performer becomes distracted, moves to a pile, unzips part of the costume below the neck, shoves a tube or other object into the suit, and then explores some of the possibilities allowed by this. Eddies of affects and responses then move through the group, sometimes generating a return to unison, and at other times a gauche, occasionally violent, set of more frenetic actions throughout the space as a whole. 

Although embodiment is a strong focus throughout, the bodies at work here come across as neither especially athletic, nor indeed particularly human. The lycra is worn over basic T-shirts and shorts, and the effect is a somewhat baggy, non-descript, often rather pear shaped physique. As more matter and cardboard is added to these constructions, the dancers become increasingly bilious and distended. On two occasions, performers become suddenly greedy, forcing almost the entire set into their frames, and violently wrenching tubes, cups and paper from each other, becoming the spitting image of the “No-Face” monster from Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Spirited Away (2001). Like No-Face, this mad consumption and expansion leads to a state of exhausted pathos and a vomiting of these bodily contents back out onto the stage. 

Even before these extremes are attained, the bodies are already uncertain and at the margins of grotesquerie. The fingers are distended and bulbous, so that when the characters engage in their initial interactions of pulling lycra, shapes and sheets of costuming off each other such that they become warped flags and sagging balloons, just grabbing at the fabric, and later at the paper and cardboard, is no easy feat. At no point do these creatures attain real elegance or control.

The sheer inventiveness of all involved in producing these movements, actions, and ways of manipulating what is soon to become rubbish, gives the show tremendous energy. A gorgeous score – presumably a collaboration between Thom McIntosh, Randerson and Kate McIntosh (no composer credit is given) – breaks the movement and choices into a dizzying series of sequences and sections. Often abrupt changes in musical style (from, for example, almost honky-tonk piano to digital dance music) forces the character-performers to shift from one action, such as scooting along the ground on their buttocks, to another, like the head-down shuffle described above.

The music is a wondrous collage of diverse elements, beginning with a broadly electronic and ‘musique concrete’ soundscape, punctuated by samples of bird tweets and other found sounds, through to dirty glitch funk and percussive hiss (at least some of this appears to be have been adapted from the Mille Plateaux label’s wonderful ‘Clicks and Cuts’ series of 2000-04), before dropping back into open textures and extended tones a la Brian Eno. 

Another motif introduced to complicate relations is where performers wrap a sheet of paper over their faces to produce a crab-clawed mask, and then slowly, deliberately, in a series of pulses moving in and out of the ribcage and through bent knees, bring their talon-like hands and arms towards and then away from the solar plexus. This seems to be the one moment of beauty or pleasure which fully arises within the choreography, but it is a dark and menacing pleasure, tied to a sense of domination and selfish victory in the character. 

All of which brings one to quite how to read or interpret this endlessly watchable sequence of ludic explorations. The contrast between the self-destructive, violent and aggressive greedy, all-consuming mode – the No-Face creatures – and the remaining performers who, when such beasts are generated, huddle together to pass between each other a shard of cardboard, is an obvious comment on community and sharing. The piece would also seem to indict contemporary consumer culture and our relentless desire for more products and the wastes we make in doing so. 

The piece ends, though, with a strange closing ritual in which one of these awesome, crab-like creatures is ritualistically struck to the ground and apparently executed by another of the lycra beings, at the behest of his or her fellows. 

This final image emerges without precedent so it remains largely opaque. It could perhaps be a reference to religious ideas of redemption through suffering and sacrifice – the executed character becoming a Christ-like figure who takes on our sins – or it could be a reference to the faceless summary justice which the leading consumerist capitalist power, the USA, has of late been administering out of Guantanamo Bay. Without further contextual support, it is difficult to make any real judgement on this, and perhaps it is unimportant.

More than anything else, the last act seems to encompass the deliberate ambivalence of a work founded on play, and treating with due respect and diligence a rather simple, unassuming, and at times quite deliberately ridiculous and comic set of rules and desires. 

If I have a criticism of this work per se, it would be in the largely easy, breezy positioning of its emotional tone, feel and effects. The fact that the dancers are all in glowing, fluorescent colours is indicative of this, for the piece overall eschews extremes in most respects. The actions are neither rigorously rule-bound and precisely choreographed, nor does a total sense of chaos and destruction ever fully overtake the stage. Instead, we mostly remain within a brightly coloured game space, in which fascistic or neurotic obsessions are rarely attained; nor is a flesh-rending, screaming explosion achieved. 

I would be interested in seeing these far poles realised. To dress the characters in an unforgiving slate grey and perform as if being drilled by an especially strict sergeant-major, or alternatively to allow some of these wilder moments to totally destroy any sense of control and spill over into something closer to butoh or Artaudian madness, would both be possibilities worth enabling within a work such as this. 

That, however, would in all probability not be the Hullapolloi of Randerson, McIntosh and the dancers anymore. Selling to audiences a work by a dance company which involves relatively little of what the lay public normally considers dance is always a hard task. The lightness of tone is probably what will enable Footnote to expand their performative palette without however alienating such a wide audience.

As it is, one could imagine Hullapolloi going down as well with modern dance aficionados as it would with school groups. This is no mean feat, and as with the other pleasures offered by this production, it is to be celebrated. 
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Highly acclaimed Jo Randerson and Kate McIntosh have collaborated to create a vibrant, insightful and entertaining performance piece. Footnote Dance Company present this hour-long performance that keeps the audience in the palm of its hand from start to finish as it explores human nature and the political dynamics of a group.   

Hullapolloi has a strong comedic vein as it portrays the humour in the human instinct to stay with the crowd, but it also asserts some darker and less desirable facets of human nature as it explores conformity and the need to control others. It questions what is normal and acceptable, and who gets to decide.

Each dancer’s face is covered by their costume, meaning that communication with the audience relies solely on physical expression, which is impeccably achieved. Not one movement is wasted or superfluous, but instead the movements are instrumental to the development of the ideas and themes of the piece. This results in a highly intelligent and entertaining experience, in which each movement is eagerly anticipated.

The cleverly designed costumes allow the dancers to create visually effective shapes, adding to the physical comedy of the piece. Seemingly unassuming props are used to alter the shape and appearance of the performers, symbolising breaking away from the group and a shift from innocence and purity. The addition of these props to the full body suits displays that as we try to change ourselves we may find that sometimes those changes cannot be undone. 

From start to finish the dancers remain on stage, requiring a huge amount of energy and making this piece very physically demanding. There is often a lot happening on stage, adding to the spectacle and enhancing the effectiveness of the synchronised sections, rather than creating clutter.

This work uses a clever compilation of music and sounds which correspond directly with the actions and intentions of the movement. The dancers also contribute vocally to the performance, weaving their breath into the soundtrack. 

The relatively small audience reacted responsively throughout with clear appreciation. Unfortunately for Wellington theatre-goers there are only two performances of Hullapolloi and one of them has passed. If you have the opportunity to go along this evening I strongly recommend you do; you will not be disappointed. 
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