DiANGLE
DiANGLE work with artists across disciplines to create experimental live performance and film. Their art drips with dark undertones, engaging the fragmentary nature of perception and its complicity in dialogues between disintegrating sonic, visual and kinetic spaces. Their debut work Dark Points (Melbourne Fringe Festival, 2019) was site-specific, a crumbling, cold, desperate choreographic and sonic landscape featuring ten dancers and an interactive set. The Dark Points film, made in collaboration with production company HiBall, will premiere and feature at Tempo dance festival 2020, and archival material will be exhibited in Gaze, Interrupted at George Paton Gallery later this year. DiANGLE’s collective background includes choreography, film composition, architecture and design. Together they navigate lightless spaces, engaging multiple communities with their cross-discipline work. DiANGLE create riveting, disruptive collaborative outcomes.
Adapted from a live production performed in a Melbourne basement, this experimental dance film is distilled from the premier work of collaborative ensemble DiANGLE. Dark Points explores the fragmentary nature of perception and our body's interaction with, and impact on an undulating, disintegrating sonic and spatial environment. Ten dancers intersect the space, their movements highlighting and disrupting the degenerative dialogue and between body, sound and physical environment.
Dark Points was coined as a collaboration between composer Mitchell Mackintosh and choreographer Thalia Livingstone before swiftly expanding to engage a multidisciplinary team of emerging artists. The generative creative process of the project, by which all elements of the production informed and depended on one another, was initiated by establishing a conceptual framework, atmosphere and meta-structure for each discipline to investigate. Collaborators for each element of the performance, sound (Mitchell Mackintosh, Thomas Schmocker), Choreography (Thalia Livingstone, Alexandra Dobson), Set (Daniel Kotsimbos), Costume (Aislinn Naughton), Lighting (John Collopy) designed their own conceptual timeline informed by this underlying structure. Negotiating the intersections of these timelines was where the composition for the piece began to unfold.
Choreographically, Thalia investigated an abstract historical relationship between the body and the physical environment. From dormant, to industrious. From destructive to desperate. The dancers use movement to surrender themselves to the space and structures.
The sound world, centred around this same sense of atmosphere and underlying structure, also builds on themes of degradation and disintegration as inspired by William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. The piece explores sonic degradation from a multitude of viewpoints, as live tape loops and granular textures build an immersive, evolving sonic environment. Change is a tangible thread as harmony rhythm and texture degrade from one state to the next, precipitating their higher entropic state. Performed live, the indeterminacy of the score and movement leads to new points of intersection with each performance.
The basement site, set and lighting design worked together to fragment perception. The unravelling of their timelines meant that elements were often left unhighlighted or obscured from the possibility of being fully perceived. The result being that different fragments of the performance are revealed uniquely to different people, the full picture is never perceivable exists merely as an idea.