There’s something about the Immigration Museum’s overwhelmingly vast Long Room – which does what it says on the tin plus being tall – that gives Met Gala.
The room’s high-drama feeling is only amplified by the arrival of lithely limber Chunky Move dancer Enzo Nazario. He appears, dragging a vast cape from his shoulders, at the other end of the hall from where Rising audiences have been assembled in a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of chairs. This cape is not red carpet-ready haute couture, however. It’s actually a giant white balloon in the process of inflating, rather alarmingly.
Discarding this strangely absorbing creature on the rust-red, stone-cold floor on which we’ve all been asked to abandon our shoes, a fluffy pink short-suited Nazario moves into the semi-circle we’ve formed as the gargantuan shape continues to spread across the floor behind him. He’s joined by Samakshi Sidhu, who dons a boxy post-box-red jacket that’s a bit Talking Heads on top of a dark green, sleeveless jumpsuit with a subtle sheen. Together they cut an intriguingly gender-queer scene, amplified by their spectacular floor work.
As choreographed by Chunky Move’s artistic director, Antony Hamilton, their powerfully unmooring movements mess with pas de deux traditions, each sharing the other’s weight in wildly dismantling ways that amaze. All the while, the flailingly pale creation steadily consuming the hall behind them attempts to steal our attention. This transfixing oddity is eventually punctured by Sidhu and Nazario, who unzip their way inside its belly. Are they swallowed whole, like Ahab by Moby Dick, or are they gutting the monstrous animal?
Now the sole subject of our startled attention, the awakened kraken gesticulates wildly, exploding upwards towards the Long Room’s ceiling in a chaotic storm of movement caught in strobe lighting – designed by Hamilton with Ashley Buchanan – that cracks our calm like thunder and lightning. Simultaneously, the swirling score, previously classical in form, erupts into skin-crawling stabs resembling the slash and crash of a horror movie.
Now it is our time to be devoured.
We enter the belly of the strangely growing and glowing beast to witness Sidhu dancing with themself. Their magnetic movement appears to attract a spectral video projection of themself that traces its ghostly way around the undulating edges of the inflatable fortress we find ourselves buried within. This billowing boundary may, at any moment, dash against your head (claustrophobes beware!).
When Nazario rejoins us inside this temple of oddness, a work that has become unnervingly menacing suddenly shapeshifts into a comic double act, but one that also demonstrates Sidhu’s remarkable singing voice and ethereally transporting throat work.
A chimeric piece that shifts from dreamscape to nightmare and back via absurdist fancies, You, Beauty is an exhilaratingly original work in which our passive involvement is made to feel suddenly central to the dancers’ stupendously sensual, physically rigorous and, yes, occasionally joyfully silly movement.
All this is aided by Andrew Treloar’s fantastical costume work, which captures the Venn diagram intersection of high fashion, club kid and kink. With that uplift, in this oddly consuming space, you’ll feel like you made it to the ball after all.
You, Beauty is playing at the Immigation Museum until June 16. Tickets start from $50 and you can get yours over here.