They exhibit the same deadpan as the dancers. Stuffed rodents, moose and marsupials jerk on and offstage. They fold, twist and turn with ping-pong timing. A reference to childhood initiates some backyard roughhousing using Adams’ familiar group choreography where people anonymously throw each other about on a tarpaulin. A toy Spanish bull from Adams’ past is our portal into a bullfight scene: the girls are toreadors, the boys are bulls. The walls of the home open onto an Aussie backyard, a tiny Hills Hoist twirls in the background. She is a Stepford wife, her absence is palpable. Is she Adams’ mother? We neither know nor care. A woman enters the house and hangs her coat. From the iconic twee of 60s suburbia to the mementos of Adams’ childhood, there isn’t a scintilla of expressivity about this work. We are treated to some horrible biscuits (Iced Vovos, I believe) while Adams gives us a tour of his collectibles.īut don’t be fooled. His house is a faux cabin/home, furnished with a selection of Australian objects, circa 1960. A select audience is welcomed by our maitre d’-Adams resplendent in brown velvet suit. Its opening look is every bit as good as David Lynch’s picket fence in Blue Velvet. Superficially, Balletlab’s latest work, Nativity, is also about a moment in personal history-choreographer Philip Adams’ childhood. The last image in Another Dream is of Hoghe’s buckled back facing the audience, his head supporting a small box of shifting sands. Hoghe is utterly present within his work in a way that gives it a dignified clarity. This moving work is meticulously crafted and performed. Its heroism is a tale of survival, of a lived body out of the ordinary, oriented towards the extra-ordinary. Another Dream is a performative recollection of things past, a revelation of time and place and body.
This simple act provoked a perceptual shift out of ordinary time into a more epic awareness. Life is not a bowl of cherries.Īt one point well into the performance, Hoghe carried a lantern along a pathway. Spare gestures accompany poignant songs, many from singers no longer with us. A lacquer box of tea lights is lit, extinguished, lit, arranged, and packed away again. Some sections are meditative, ritualistic, even reverential. Hoghe lies down for peace beside a red t-shirt. The colour red stands out-communism, solidarity, blood. His 1960s is decidedly German: it consists of post-war rubble, his sister scrubbing steps, the local cinema he frequented.įamous songs of the 60s delineate each section of the piece, which consists of simple actions: repeated arm gestures, a reclining body waving an incense stick in time to the music, hands measuring the length of the body, walking patterns. Hoghe successively unfolds himself to the gaze of the spectator, simultaneously revealing some things about time and place. Music is used to stimulate memories and feelings, whereas words articulate his life experience. Evoking the social via a poetics of the personal, Hoghe quietly walks us through his account of this period. Raimund Hoghe’s performative reflection on the 1960s, Another Dream, is a collage of many such moments. Moments we remember as shared and personal. Pivotal events become woven into the fabric of human existence: John F Kennedy’s assassination, the death of John Lennon, the aeroplanes crashing into the Twin Towers.
Particular songs remind us of periods and situations in our lives. We, the vinyl generation, are able to recollect our personal histories through the music of our time. ‘Sweet bird, that shunn’st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy.’
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