The third major work of scale programmed in this year's Melbourne Festival (in addition to Under Siege and A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) was the collaboration of artistic giants Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson, and Jamie xx, resulting in the contemporary ballet Tree of Codes. Giants in their respective fields - choreography, visual art, and electronic music - in combination, and with the extraordinary talents of a group of dancers from Company Wayne McGregor and the Paris Opera Ballet, they were able to realise a truly beautiful and technically staggering performance.
The work is based on the Jonathan Safran Foer art book of the same name, which is itself an iteration of another novel, The Street of Crocodiles. These series of iterations and nesting dolls of influence reverberate throughout the work both visually and choreographically. Tree of Codes the book is novel The Street of Crocodiles with words and lines cut out of it, so that upon opening it the reader is looking through pages, reading a book that telescopes into itself and becomes both a narrative and a sculpture, in a state of constant spatial flux. The manifestation of this source text in performance is not so much explicitly about the narrative as it is about ideas of fracturing, reflecting, and iterating both space and the human body.
The most outwardly impressive element of this work is Olafur Eliasson's truly staggering stage design. In fact, the lighting and fly rigs of the State Theatre had to be structurally modified to accommodate the enormous set and extensive lighting design. The set changed over the course of the performance, but was essentially a series of screens and mirrors that descended from the ceiling, moved, and reflected and refracted the dancers in surprising and beautiful ways. A giant mirror with fracture lines in it, and sections that spun inwards to create a 90 degree space, alternatively reflected and masked dancers in such a way that bodies were constantly appearing and disappearing, duplicating and splitting. Later in the performance, enormous perspex screens also dropped in front of the mirror and were gently tilted back and forth, creating and uncertain and liminal spaces on stage where the reflections in the mirror were tinted and multiplied, and the perceptive differences between bodies in front of and behind the screens could be explored. In the final section, the back mirror was flown up, and a final screen was dropped at the front of the stage with two enormous spinning discs embedded within it. As a final image, it evoked orbits and reframed the bodies onstage in a cosmic context.
Smaller design elements were just as affecting as the enormous and technically complex screens and mirrors. A short sequence with what looked like a series of mirrored gramophone horns onstage was mesmerising, as dancers stuck their hands into them and turned them into kaleidoscopic, churning organisms, made up of infinite refractions of the human hand. The very opening scene, performed in complete darkness, saw dancers come onto the stage with small lights attached to different parts of their bodies - they were not visible as humans, but the buoyancy and grace of their movements had a beautiful anthropomorphic quality, and situated them somewhere between humanity and the cosmos, an idea reflected and revisited in the final sequence.
The lighting was also technically complex and beautifully realised. The use of spotlights and warm floods intermittently directed at the audience made the cavernous State Theatre feel intimate, and allowed for the reflections of the dancers on the mirrors and screens to sometimes incorporate the reflections of the audience as well. Particularly impressive from a lighting perspective was a short scene where the dancer in front of a screen was lit in undulating multicolour, and the dancers behind it were lit such that they looked as though they were dancing in a sepia photograph. The precision and mastery of the lighting design was world class, and incorporated a number of effects and states that I've never seen before - like many of the technical elements of this show, it has the potential to become a benchmark and a touchstone for local artists moving forward.
Jamie xx's music also played with ideas of reflection and refraction. Reverberating, heartbeat-like base lines were overlaid with vocal samples and electronic melodies that thematically supported both the design and the choreography. Particularly interesting was the way that human sounds were incorporated into the electronic soundtrack - the opening sound recalled hands clapping, and the vocal samples beautifully cut through the electronic elements of the sound design. Indeed the music formed a bridge between the immense, technically slick set, and the human bodies that occupied it, by allowing these two seemingly disparate entities to seamlessly and beautifully coexist.
What brought the work together for me however, and changed it from being merely technically impressive to being humanly beautiful, was Wayne McGregor's choreography, and the stunning performances from his dancers, and those of the Paris Opera Ballet. McGregor's choreography concerns itself with the connections and interactions between bodies in space, even if those bodies are not necessarily touching. In this work, beautiful and unexpected symmetries appeared in ensemble passages, and even when dancers did not seem to be dancing together, their movements influenced all the other movements in the space. It's impossible to choose a stand-out performer - this really was an ensemble piece. Passages en pointe showed McGregor's talent as a ballet choreographer, whilst remaining fresh and contemporary. There was a huge emphasis placed on the human body in motion - the costuming for the majority of the piece was skin-coloured underwear, and the choreography highlighted and celebrated the capacity of the dancers to create dymanic movement.
Most significant, however, was the sense of joy that pervaded every element of this performance. The design was executed with a sense of awe and wonder, and aimed to suffuse the audience with the same delight at the seeming impossibility of the images created onstage. The music and dancing were also full of dynamism and joy, making the performance an uplifting experience for its audience, an opportunity to feel a childlike wonder and pride at what the human body and mind are capable of.
Throughout the show I was drawn over and over again to the idea of fractals - mathematical structures in which each part has the same shape and character as the whole. Precise, complex, and technically challenging, fractals allow us to model and understand some of the most beautiful things on earth - snowflakes, plants, the galaxy itself. With its marriage of humanity and technology, and its span from the minute to the cosmic, as well as the concern across all levels of design and performance with reflection and refraction, Tree of Codes recalled for me an awe-inspiring fractal structure - more complex and beautiful the closer you look.