Keep Everything

Melbourne-based Chunky Move is known for its irreverent, genre-mashing take on contemporary dance, and this ethos informs new work Keep Everything, choreographed by Antony Hamilton and showing at Arts House. The title reflects Hamilton’s development process for the piece, an artists’ mantra affirming exploration without restraint or self-editing.

It is also a subtle reference to the work’s loose theme of human progress. This is the survival not of the fittest, but of whatever is left standing. Performers Benjamin Hancock, Lauren Langlois and Alisdair Macindoe are like uncanny post-human beings in an apocalyptic space, morphing from animalistic organisms to robotic animations and back again in a subversive history of evolution. Woven into Hamilton’s choreography are also some very funny flashes of humanity celebrating the banality of the everyday: looking for lost objects, wrangling wayward pets.

It is of course a highly polished production, scored by musicians Kim Moyes and Julian Hamilton (also known as electronic act The Presets), and featuring rocking lighting and AV design by Benjamin Cisterne and Robin Fox. And yet despite its slickness, it retains an essential spirit of spontaneity and impulse, as though the performance was unfolding organically before our eyes. Out of the rubble, Hamilton shows us, riches are found.

Keep Everything
Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 521 Queensberry St, North Melbourne
Now until 24 August
artshouse.com.au