CANNIBAL

One reviewer waxed about Matthew Day’s Sydney Fringe show, Thousands: “It’s like disco butoh in a gold wash.” This complex image is useful in approaching this Melbourne-based choreographer’s work – which is an electrifying meld of high and low art, all to a pulsating electronic soundtrack by Sydney sound artist James Brown. We ask Day to go beyond the analogy.

What is meant by the title, Cannibal?

I guess I’m using the word Cannibal metaphorically. I had been exploring visceral and repetitive movement scores in the studio and playing with ideas of ‘animal’. I’m interested in how we sustain ourselves and what energy and resources we feed on to fulfill our needs and desires.

At what stage does it take place in the trilogy, and what relation does it have to Thousands?

Cannibal is the second work in the Trilogy series following Thousands, which uses an incredibly slow movement score to explore themes of multiplicity and microscopy. Cannibal continues with the theme of multiplicity and explodes the microscopy of Thousands into waves of repetitive movement and obsessive rhythms.

Is it hard to talk about your own choreography? How do you describe this work and your practice in general?

It’s definitely a challenge to translate into words the things that excite me in the studio physically and the choreographic questions I feel compelled to research. I am constantly taking notes in the studio and documenting my physical process, this is vital to me making sense of what is happening on the floor. I need words in the studio to have a conversation between the conceptual and the physical. Often however if someone asks, “what is it about” I am very stuck. I’m not interested in narrative dance; I believe dance can do so many interesting things on levels of rhythm and physical intensity. I think it’s the power of dance to articulate knowledge and intelligence physically, without words. We can make sense with our bodies, but for that you have to be there, in the flesh.

And what is your earliest memory of dance?

My first memory of dance is running round in circles in my suburban backyard when I was about 4 years old. When I was a bit older I used to make up dances to Let’s Get Physical with the boy who lived across the road. His dad drove a semi trailer, which became our stage; I don’t think his dad liked it very much for some reason!

Feb 16-26, PACT Theatre, 107 Railway Pde, Erskineville, $18-22, greentix.com.au/events