Dance / Mountain, Melanie Lane. At The Playhouse, October 17. Reviewed by SAMARA PURNELL.

The stunning Brindabella ranges, right here on our doorstep, inspired choreographer and former Canberra dancer Melanie Lane to create this remarkable work of five dancers from local and interstate dance companies.

Local dancer Sara Black, Max Burgess, Tyrel Dulvarie, Madeleine Bowman and former Bangara dancer Yolanda Lowatta performed the Canberra show.

In a huge drawcard for the production and adding another tantalising string to its bow, are costumes designed by Akira Isogawa. The timeless beauty of the landscape contrasted with a modern costume design of deconstructed blue denim jeans and jackets. The striking blue of the Brindabellas is nuanced here with a soft blue and white palette. At the same time, these costumes appear to comment on the mountains of textile waste humans create.

Stiff, heavily textured and multilayered design extended the frame of the dancers, giving them wide hips, high leg coverings and heavy, wing-like capes. The arm holes also allowed dancers to connect to each other’s costumes. Underneath the denim, which is shed in stages, each dancer wore a bodysuit covered with splashes of white paint, scratches in ochre colours and lines at once portraying the body paint of indigenous dancers, rock art, the scars and patterns of mountainous rockfaces and snow-kissed mountain ranges.

UK composer Clark’s recorded soundscape blends beautifully with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra Chamber Ensemble, which performs on stage. Thunder, rain and music blend with violins, cello and the piano. The musicians are given their own moments in the spotlight and the dancers remain connected to them throughout, with the balance between dancer and musician giving the appearance of a simultaneous question and response to each other.

The opening tableaux of the ensemble began to unfurl ever so slowly. Under the lighting of Bosco Shaw and Nick Moloney, slow and staccato movements sink gently into the time and space in between. Lane appears to delicately reference martial arts, Kabuki and warrior poses with quirky gestures interwoven – a tongue stuck out, a lick, a thumb drawn across the throat. Some gestures implied that the communication of the dancers was hindered.

The ensemble form tableaux and poses, often with a dancer lifted to create the peak of the mountain. These also took on a religious tone, calling to mind renaissance paintings and iconography. The dancers seamlessly transition from solos and duets, with Black and Dulvarie’s dance particularly beautiful – at one stage Dulvarie gracefully lifts Black on to his shoulders as he rises from a squatting position, in a display of understated strength from his tall, slim frame.

Dancers take turns to carry and be carried, to slowly rise and fall, to burden and unburden each other. Finally, Burgess appears, vulnerable, carrying thin bamboo branches, before dancers join him, costumed now in delicate white tulle, the pattern ever so faintly visible. The dance is poignant, sacrificial and angelic: a final spiritual and religious ascension as the dancers form their final pose to the melodic resolution.

Mountain is timeless, cyclical and ancient, traversing peaks and troughs. A remnant of all that has been, where the symmetry of nature meets the ethereal and each element of dance, music and costume perfectly combine.

The dancers are at once the rocks and mountains themselves, perhaps the weather, perhaps gods, the landscape in human form, carrying the knowledge imbued into nature. They are enduring, vulnerable, surreal.

Mountain is a richly textural work – ethereal, beautiful and thought-provoking.

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