Direction by Bex Anson MHz

Movement Artists – Philip Alexander McDonald, Rita Hu, and Suzi Cunningham

Easily earning itself the most influentially abstract of the Manipulate Festival 2024 pieces, Bex Anson MHz’s highly visual expressive dance performance Ruins (performed by Suzi Cunningham, Rita Hu, and Philip Alexander McDonald) commands an entire spectrum of life. Three beings, the last humans on Earth, become homunculi as they find their existence reliant on an enormous pulsating cube – the machinery that keeps them alive.

Taking heavy inspiration from Donna Haraway’s eco-feminist writing Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin with Chthulucene; the explosive rupture of performance and visual art can occasionally be an overloading of the sense (capturing Haraway’s Lovecraftian title-inspiration to the letter). Initially garbed, the three performers gradually (d)evolve into a metamorphosis embarked on by the most unnatural means. Pulsating, gyrating, and pushing the limits of the human body to levels many of us thought incapable from both a physical and psychological standpoint, the choreography and intimacy of Ruins are striking, if also nauseating in positive, but strange ways.

Most impressively, is that while the projection over the meshing of the Dav Bernard MHz’s design traverses us through familiar (and heavily unfamiliar) imagery of both the everyday and grotesque, much of the dance sequence ventures into the conceptual themes of identity, society (and its downfall), and right into the heart and beating breast of the ‘natural order’ of life. It creates an emotional turmoil cauldron where everything and anything can be experienced as we come together to not so much mourn the ruins of civilization but to live within them. They are, after all, of our creation.

Ruins push well past any conceivable idea of a traditional narrative, though the story here is as fundamentally instinctual as possible. From chrysalis to butterflies to death and the hereafter, much of the additional elements of clever lighting are utilised to benefit the three exceptional performances that find elegance and poise, even as they roll and slither through the muck and grime at the end of all things. Completed by an enrapturing soundtrack from Cucina Povera, one which is as equally impressive as it is distressing, that rounds the piece off into a success.

Pulsating, successful, and both as sobering as it is celebratory, Ruins rounds of an exceptionally diverse and engaging year for Manipulate – which joins the likes of Tortoise in a Nutshell’s Ragnarok or La Conquête as pieces which ensnare the audience with ease and pace, and though not always carried off to the highest level, is still a tremendous success from the metaphysical, and literal point of view.

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