Intrepid: Dauntless; courageous resolute fearlessness
Bazaar: A fair or sale at which miscellaneous articles are sold, often for charitable purposes
The promotional blurb promises a mixture of dance, music, poetry, audio-visual and hybrid acts “of the adventurous kind” to raise money for Amy Mauvan to study dance at the Limon Institute in New York.
Pah Homestead is a grand old dame, now part of the Wallace Art Trust. It provides a luxurious and elegant backdrop for the random shenanigans of the moment.
A nice touch art-exhibition-style is the wine (sponsored by Whitehaven), cheese and nibbles to take the edge off and we know instantly that this is a browsing space.
Soft blues and reds cast light against white walls, bay windows and works of contemporary art. The First Impressions are of Amy Mauvan, Jesse Quaid, Sarah Holmes and Samantha Rawnsley-Wood of Etched Dance Productions in plain blacks with focused gestural conversational improvisations, in duet and trio. There’s a large set of wings, one stone dog alongside two human ‘puppies’ playing, and humorous shufflings and scrapings in and out of the rooms accompanied by the richly smooth and captivating voice of Monique Shelford. This compelling musician proved her worth again at the close of the evening.
Creator/performer solos are the main fare, with performers appearing casually, sometimes migrating to different locations, often merging with our own audience choreography: Stand..walk.. stare.. lean.. sit.. chat.. stop.. sip.. look..
Tracey Templeton, a black silhouette on the stairs entices us up past the skeleton scrum into her plastic ‘painting with body’ enclosure. In Honesty Please, Sarah Holmes in a blue tube dress edges and jerks us from room to mezzanine and disappears completely. Georgia Giesen, gazing upwards at a ceiling projection of trees starts and stops in contemplative repose to drum and base.
Duet What can I do here features a verbal accompaniment by Brad Johnson, the cup-of-tea-toting Abe Lincoln lookalike. He reads (was this the advertised poetry?), and Jesse Quaid entwines herself around a chair to stories about rugby, KFC and other vagaries of life we see in our papers.
Icaro is a sinewy solo by Eric Beltran performed in silence and to “The Tartu piano” by Max Ritcher. It has an ancient, primal and spiritual feel. A tassled white cloth fixed to a leather headpiece is used effectively as both costume and prop. His dignified authoritative stillness, shaking and sustained sequences are hypnotic at times, embodying, one assumes; the medicine song of a Shaman.
Intrepid Bazaar could easily have been called Upstairs Downstairs. It’s a two and a half hour programme and the A4 sheet complete with map, info and grid timetable is an effort to follow. It seems simpler to just lose oneself in the arbitrary moment. I get the feeling that if I stop in one place too long I might miss something, but aside from SMS Collective which is stopped due to “an incident” and Monkey Mum by Amy Mauvan I get a glimpse of most performers and can take the time to absorb some of the eclectic objet d’art.
There is something for everyone. A favourite part of the evening is an unplanned interlude in an art installation: God’s Little Launderette by Brendan McGorry. The tiny colourful room that takes me back to the feeling of being in a homemade fort (only better), promotes a wonderful spontaneous discussion on PINA to the backbeat of a roulette wheel on an agitator in a golden washing machine.
At any bazaar there are trinkets and curios and the odd treasure. The take home item for me is is Clare Luiten almost bursting out of her skin dancing a short improvised (methinks) piece in a short slip to a dramatic violin accompaniment (composer name absent). The energy in the room suddenly lifts and damn near explodes as she pours herself out in spades, whirling and flinging, completely owning the space with consummate ease. There is a quiet “that was fun” and happy sigh as she walks through us, somewhat breathless as we are.
I have to borrow Forrest Gump’s well hashed line here and say Intrepid Bazaar is aptly named and definitely “like a baax aav chaaclates”. You never know what you’re gonna get: And that is the secret of its success.
It’s not one of those ‘knock you on the head’ wow nights so much as an enjoyable fun and relaxing immersion in arty whim, and as the name suggests; dauntless fancy. It is a well organised event and it is fantastic to see the camaraderie within the dance industry supporting one of our own to fly.
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
Comments
val smith August 8th, 2011
an ambitious idea this event, commendations to amy for pulling this together, that was a huge undertaking, and i wonder with all that effort did it have the desired outcomes? i mean financially? i was disappointed for amy by the relatively smallish turnout, i wondered where the hell was the dance community?! Perhaps some obvious possible reasons why were: cost and distance and ...
i didn't realise clare luiten or eric beltrane were performing, what i nice surprise!
yes, clare is a stunning mover as always, but her work, like most of what i saw that night, didn't really grab me, i realised through post event discussions in the car ride home that i really desire to know more about a performer when i watch them, i want them to tell me something important about themselves or about the world or about ideas, like something that is really REALLY important to them. i'm just simply not interested in seeing dancing for the sake of dancing, i just don't see the point?
i went along for two reasons,
a) i wanted to support amy in her limon training ambitions, hearing myself sounding very wanky i think - how bizarre and interesting and retro - but really, i'm fascinated to see how she transforms with her time over there, what sort of body will she return with? GOOD ON YOU AMY! (will she ever come back i wonder ...?) i love to watch amy as a performer, with an underlying sense of darkness in her quality, gorgeous!, but is it a conscious quality?
and b) i love georgia gieson's work. admittedly she has become a fond friend this year, but for me, she truly stood out in this event as an Artist. her work is beautiful, visually and emotionally, and she is one of few dance performers currently active who move me with their mere presence, and she knows how to move us, its being crafted by her in the moment, is this skill - to touch another through performance - learnable? for someone as young as georgia to be so filled with knowing on stage is quite a feat, for some reason i get filled with hope and gratitude by this. which is nice... i loved looking between the tiny gestures she makes and her glances across space and the large projection of moving sky and tree on the ceiling.
What pleasantly surprised me about the event was eric's performance. firstly i was surprised because he glided down the stairwell as i was arriving, and he was gorgeously elegant, his costume was exquisite and vulnerable and evocative and mysterious, i was captivated because of its mixed readings - masochist leather mask mixed with greek figure draped fabric, mixed with a mostly naked impish boy body. i loved how eric used the fabric as backdrop unfolded and refolded like a soldier does for those service rituals that honour death. there was a level of reading for me about hidden sexuality in military which i want to describe as refined. there was also a sense of the animalistic with a horselike creature emerging and dissolving. i really appreciated the commitment of this artist, and their sincere contribution of self, such a beautiful thing.
there was a sense of awkwardness amongst some of the audience with eric's overt 'gayness'. was i paranoid or was there an almost quiet twittering or whispering about him going on? what fucks me off about this back twittering is that no-one comments on how 'so-and-so' is "soooo hetero"? this is such a dumb unconscious unquestioned habit of overt HOMOPHOBIA. but "so-and-so" is soooo bloody well heterosexual in their emobodied ways, you just DON'T notice it. and this is so easily accepted. so when are we going to be able to look at an overtly queer body without feeling in some way uncomfortable, or in some way feeling sorry for, or in someway reading all manner of unspeakable sexual behaviours written all over the body in question.
i saw a gay man claiming space without apology, and with pride, and that in this day is STILL brave, i saw a body written with a history of gendered being not seen very commonly in media or even on stage, or when it is seen, it is seen as different, other, eccentric, or perhaps cute, or funny, or just wierd, like so no like you or i, of course not, THEY are so completely other than us. END ANNOYED RANT HERE.
otherwise all i have to say is YAY ART, yay the little rachelle pedesen piece upstairs, yay toss wollaston, yay the skeletons, and yay the HUGE toilets, amazingly lush venue for a lovely community event.