Make Your Life Count

Sarah Aiken’s dance/video work represents or dramatizes the concept of, if you will, being and nothingness – or, as she puts it, ‘the paradox… of the individual swollen to grotesque importance while also reduced to ineffectual even invisible impotence.’  It is as if Sarah Aiken is saying, ‘Make Your Life Count – if you can…

She begins downstage, climbing through a square frame as if escaping.  But that frame or another is at once projected on the huge upstage cyclorama and Sarah is a silhouette within it – confined, trapped, imprisoned.  Her silhouette is huge, then life-size, then small; she may crouch, kneel, or touch the walls, but there is no escape: Sarah – and therefore, clearly, us too – is forever within a frame.  The frame could be, one supposes, convention, societal expectation, or genetic destiny.  That much is clear.  (This sequence may go on just a bit too long.)

Then, in a visually striking and dead pan funny sequence – and the only verbal exchange in the show - Sarah encounters a Giant, or God (Claire Leske).  She is a huge but intimate image projected onto and filling the cyclorama, crouching, or lying down – dressed in the same clothes as Sarah.  Sarah herself is scarcely as tall as the face.  God (let’s call her God) asks disturbing questions and offers useless advice.  (Text by Ms Aiken and Megan Payne.)  The audience laughs: we get it.

No matter how overwhelming then, authority cannot solve the dilemma.  Anyway, is ‘authority’ really only us, writ huge?  We are left to the paradox and our own devices – even if God (if it is ‘God’) still keeps a huge eye upon us. 

And, interfaced with real, human Sarah, and projected at first in God’s eye, there are increasingly complex, even dizzying video projections - a multiplication of images, with sound from Andrew Wilson - highly accomplished, imaginative compositions that shatter our sense of the ‘individual’, imposing, and superimposing images of Sarah dancing, walking, watching, overwhelmed by choices, duplicating until there are hundreds and hundreds of Sarahs on the huge screen – big, life-size, and receding through to tiny just perceptible images…

Now real Sarah plays with the projection, moving about the stage and breaking it up into smaller images – see how easy it is? - with screens and boxes that reflect parts of the master image on screen.  (This sequence definitely does go on too long.) 

Finally, in a shocking contrast, we are in a laboratory (perhaps) watching time lapse footage of the emergence of a rather grotesque plant…  On the wall, a sign, the projection of which real Sarah captures and extracts on a small screen: MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT.

Sarah Aiken is a highly accomplished and award-winning choreographer, dancer, and teacher.  Her evident fascination with video and the desire to make ‘conglomerate forms… wedding technology and corporality’ maybe leads her off course – at least here.  In an interview on the Creative Victoria website (pre this show), she says that she is hoping to show her work across more platforms – and in different contexts - that is, in galleries as well as in theatres - and continuing to incorporate video into her live performance works. 

Here we see one result of her continuing work.  The paradox, the central dilemma is created or represented clearly, but in the end Make Your Life Count goes only so far.  It may indeed work better as a gallery installation rather than a theatre piece.  Even at only an hour, the show seems to me over long, over insistent.  Video, no matter how brilliant in realisation, has taken over. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Tiffany Garvie