Review: Deep Sea Dances

Deep Sea Dances was a new contemporary dance work by Rebecca Jensen. The performance space is in The Stables are Arts Houses’ Meat Market, we entered into a large space with beautiful projections on the walls, we were asked to remove our shoes and socks and entered into another large space in the building, the floor was covered with squishy plastic and there were chairs and pillows either side of the long room to sit on. Deep Sea Dances was performed by a large ensemble of trans femme and trans women, and female identifying people, it was presented in what I felt like several ‘parts’. The performance began with a dance choreographed by Dorris Humpfry in 1928, she is often forgotten and her experimental choreography is often credited to men who created work in the 1950’s. After the dance was finished Rebecca came out and told us what we had just seen, acknowledged the traditional custodians of the land which we were viewing the work and announced Deep Sea Dances would now begin. A big roller door then opened at one end of the space and the performers came in one by one, kinda like a cat walk in a fashion show, they were wearing this strange shimmery dark pants, dresses and shirts, and they were drenched in water, this was accompanied by a smoke machine and loud intense music. Several more ‘parts’ followed this, that had a similar vibe to each other, they started off quite gentle and fluid then build into a climax of bodies erratically dancing and seemingly merging together then dissolving into the floor. Deep Sea Dances is beautiful, quirky and wholesome, it felt very special to witness, and is probably one of my favorite shows I’ve seen, my only problem was I didn’t get a very good seat and often had to strain to see what was happening at the other side of the room, but apart from that I had a great time, I felt lots of different emotions and thoughts, it was a very internal experience that often bubbled up to the surface in different ways like giggling or gasping The lighting design by Matt Adey was, like all of Matt Adeys’ work was amazing and the sound by Marco Cher-Gibbard and Rebbeca Jensen, again like all of their work was fantastic. Deep Sea Dances is part of Dance Massive a bi-annual dance festival, there are multiple work showing in multiple venues across Melbourne, the festival is on now and goes until March 26th, as does Deep Sea Dances. Deep Sea Dances in on now at Meat Market in North Melbourne. Written by Finley Fletcher Image by Gregory Lorenzutti

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