Getting into Pacific Skin is a ritualistic affair.

A karanga-esque call from acclaimed musician Caitlin Smith draws us up and into the Q Loft theatre while ice cool women in Pacific garb manage the audience’s flow by freezing in our paths and ushers prevent ascension into the seating block to direct us to mingle amongst the prone performers and driftwood installations that are scattered around the performance area. Usher #1 says I may sit if I must but should stand if I can. Sit I do. I need perspective beyond the somnabulistically shuffling audience which obscures the installation.

This set up is the first of a few conceits which halt the flow of work throughout the evening.

The entry proves to be the preamble to the first work Wai Me? By Cathy Livermore which is a continuation of her oeuvre of environmentally-concerned and Pacific-themed performances. A portion of the audience is led to the stage to be seated in four quadrants so as to become a design element for the remainder of the audience in the seating block. The action takes place in corridors between them and they are encouraged to participate in the sound score. I’m not opposed to moving or being moved (thank you Yvonne Rainer) but the gentle remonstration, and heavy illustration leaves no room for me to participate in a dialogue. I ‘get it’ but do not connect to it. Steven Bain cuts a strange figure, sometimes participating and sometimes standing apart observing the action of nine dancers or just wandering about contrarily. Livermore’s daughter Kayalani and another young dancer make the cast multigenerational. It is rare to see such community and diversity in a contemporary dance work and it is a refreshing change from the regular platoon of ‘good’ dancers that we might expect in this venue.

Cathy Livermore herself is a magnificent performer, and her presence and vocalisations have a direct visceral effect that is absent from other aspects of the work. As Gaia/essence/wai she communicates the concerns of the work with authenticity. Video projection by Peter Vosper and an avatar projection (a hyperrealistic rendering of a face, with live feed of the stage action visible in the pupil of the Avatar’s eye) by Mark Sagar, are beautifully crafted and frame the work well.

As an aside, a  man meets woman ending is weird in a Mills and Boon cover kind of way. I get the sentiment but man that is some heavy schmaltz.

Baku (with poetry by Helen Sword, vocals by Smith, and dancers Tomomi Watanabe, Yoshihiro Horie and Aska Suzuki), is a  dance equivalent to a nonsense poem, with visual  languages coming thick and fast and the melodrama set to pantomime level. There is live calligraphy, a motif with a spyglass, talking, yelling, angsting and staggering about, and multiple movement styles including some references to martial arts and (maybe?)  Japanese pop music culture. Ultimately it’s just stuff in the same way that when you mix too many colours together you get white (let’s not argue the science facts here please). There are interactive projections by Mark Pulsford which are independently interesting, but why and to what end anything happens in this work I can’t decipher. The title Baku is not elaborated on as a concept or theme in the program notes.

Smith’s extended vocal technique is impressive and rich in this work and throughout the show (as is Livermore’s). ‘Sequestered to the side’ is how I often describe the live musicians who could be better visually integrated into a performance space and this is sometimes true here.

Antarctica by Stephen Bain starts with Lisa Greenfield vocalising gently into a flash-looking microphone but to no audible effect. Greenfield is an engaging performer but what I believe was a technical fault in a microphone preoccupies me and I forget to listen to what is being said. Before we know it there are four things happening. Greenfield (microphone now working ) is creating a whispered hissed soundscape of text addressed directly to the audience. A minimally dressed woman, Tallulah Holly-Massey, is gingerly  moving through the space, seemingly absorbed in her own somatic world. A brace of bucket helmeted, high-vis vest wearing, rope wrestling rescuers are blindly rollicking around the space amongst a sea of purple buckets which have fallen from the ceiling (clumsily knocking the somatic woman for six in the process), and a digital blizzard, comprised of video by Janine Randerson, is blowing on the back wall. Greenfield’s face is submerged in a bucket of water, altering the quality of the sound, and the forms of keystone cop rescuers are recreated amidst the snowy projection as ghostly echoes. There are layers in this work, both literal and abstract. It is sometimes profoundly beautiful, sometimes self-destructively irreverent. One to think about further.

Geoff Gilson’s TPPN/A is absurd, confronting, messy, mystifying and quite endearing. Like Livermore in the opening work, Gilson employs a broad range of collaborators and performers to create a protest-pastiche-carnival of events. Gilson states his interest  to “investigate how complicity aims to direct an audiences’ value system in a performative way to make them complicit to the hegemonic structure of the piece, as a visual and experiential metaphor for the current negotiations surrounding the TPPA” I’m not sure that recruiting the audience to participate in the work is automatically equal to the above proposition and besides, the task of assembling tents seems like a really positive team building exercise. I enjoy the participation of Phoebe Heyhoe and Flavio Villani as the ‘slaves to the system’ who are musical contributors, and Gilson’s bombastic , ripped torso’ed, capitalist pig character replete with LED light gimp mask is quite a show stealer. Is it a problem that I still don’t know why the TPPA is a bad thing ? Is that proof of something?

Pacific Skin is a an evening of work that intends to deliver a lot of content but occasionally creaks under its own weight. The set ups are laborious and sometimes I wonder if the payoff is worth it, but I’m hesitant to suggest that anything needs to change to make the work more successful. Foregrounding alternative values, methodologies and knowledge systems in art is important, and there is room for different approaches. Ultimately  the interconnectivity of, and collaboration between cultures, communities, artists and technologies is reason enough to see this challenging show.

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