Ever wondered what a dream would look like danced out on stage?
Twelfth Floor will transport you to the inner workings of the mind - a physical portrayal of the subconscious, society and madness.
Australian collaborative Dance Touring Partnership have attracted swathes of praise for their production of creator Tanja Leidtke’s only full-length piece since her accidental death in 2007.
Staged in a non-descript green-walled building, three mentally ill patients at first seem odd and random, but as the dance progresses their characters and quirks are nourished and developed.
Two muslce-flexing men in jogging bottoms and wife-beater vests jostle and compete in bizarre and trivial contests. One shuffling figure sticks to the shadows and draws stick people and messages of escape and hope in chalk on the walls.
Enter a new patient. A little nymph in the form of Kristina Chan. The Elmhurst/Rambert trained dancer immediately captivates the stage with intricate finger movements, and is clearly the star of the show.
The four inmates are controlled by the embodiment of the regime, danced stunningly Amelia McQueen and reminiscent of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. After setting the scene of schoolroom antics and institutionalism, layers of depth are added to each character - as they struggle against their meaningless state of captivity.
The nurse is caught off guard when she catches the inmates mocking her staccato curus and wrist flicks. This marks a tangible moment when the order begins to crumble. The once comic interplay between the men becomes threatening and sinister and their obsession with sex and holes, played out in a laugh-out-loud scene where the two masturbate against a wall, is transposed onto the nurse in a dark expression of psychotic lust. Here McQueen demonstrates an astounding ability to command her own body, and her rigidity and costume make her seem like a manquin or blow-up doll, adding a smokescreen of illusion to the attack.
But Chan emerges as the child-like heroine of the piece. She brings flashes of pure joy to the dancing, isolating parts of her body in mesmerising solos and creating beautiful contorted lines with her tiny body.
The effect is a montage of society’s outcasts and portrayal of modes of confinement and isolation. When Chan manages to scale the walls and dip over to the other side, leaving her hands visible for an excruciating moment of suspense, the audience also feels her release and freedom in escape. The twelfth floor, left empty, darkens as the audience slowly awakes from the crude vivid landscape of the mind.
