For the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Chunky Move presented Black Marrow by choreographers Erna Omarsdottir and Damien Jalet at the Malthouse Theatre on Sturt street. Both Erna and Damien have always been interested in what influences and succeeds civilization alongside the forgotten rituals from our ancestors. For this production they created an alternative energy of what was, is and will be in regards to our relationship with the land and our planet. It was a performance providing a window into another plane and visceral world.
It began with an unsettling, barren aesthetic which moved sporadically with the use of a black sheet centre stage. It was a unique examination of a wasteland and dark energy, giving the audience an insight just into land itself before the introduction of life. I found myself hypnotized by the movements under the black sheet. Its presentation was extremely unique and provocative in looking at our physical space through a darker mirror.
The movement was startling and acute, the performers (Sara Black, Julian Crotti, Alisdair Macindoe, Carlee Mellow and James Shannon) moving as if missing a limb or their head and often binding into one entity, which looked at the innate animalistic nature of civilization. This was deliberately being reductive in seeing everything as similar. Another sequence which was reducing civilization to its components, featured the performers as cognitions in a working machine examining our daily, monotonous rituals and was executed with differing rhythmic motion which fundamentally represented the same things. This choreography pointed out how civilization has progressed. The use of mechanical sounds (Ben Frost) assisted the performers' repetitive and rhythmic movements in their physical machine and was executed with precision - the choreographers making excellent use of the performers' talent.
They used a narrator-type character (Paulo Castro) who was a suited male contrasting the other performers in nude costumes. His costume represented a familiar archetypal working male today. Placing the narrator and the nude performers together perfectly blended society today with animalistic ritual.
The performance was a very dark mirror - a reflection of incoherent meaning that we daily attempt to rationalize as time goes by. It was unsettling in its depiction of how we roam the land and delivered with astonishing talent.

Other recent works by Chunky Move include Glow, Two Faced Bastard and I Like This.