Melinda Smith is one with Xena. In an after-show Q and A following a breathtaking performance of her new work, Conduit Bodies, disability inclusion activist, artist, poet, dancer and excelling all-round multi-hyphenate Smith tells the audience that she actively pushes back against negative connotations surrounding wheelchairs. She insists that Xena, so named after the warrior princess depicted by Lucy Lawless, is part of her body. It’s how Smith moves in this world, whether in it or not.
The beauty of this symbiotic relationship glimmers during a deeply emotive, illuminatingly abstract show wrought from a series of Smith’s formative memories. They are translated through the many mediums she seamlessly melds with a little help from assistive tech inventor Alon Ilsar, also on percussion. Conduit Bodies is a magnetic push-pull ballet between chaos and sublime, Zen-like calm.
Opening in near darkness, a moon-like circle softly glows in the centre of the stage, accompanied by the star-like glimmer of lights dancing on humming haptic vests worn by some audience members to feel the performance. Smith enters on one chair – not Xena – and moves towards Ilsar’s drum kit as if to join his performance, but, at first at least, it’s not to be. Retreating to an old typewriter, her mimed use of it erupts into a cavalcade of jumbled letters swirling on a rear curtain as a feeling of frustration thunders into view.
Both that backdrop and the moon-space are vibrantly alive canvases on which dance digital echoes of Smith’s visual art that she magics into being via the wand-like ‘airsticks’ she wears. Created in conjunction with Ilsar and digital visual designer Sam Trolland, this pioneering assistive tech allows her to paint in both sound and vision, also conjuring Björk-like brilliance through audio interpretation of her movements to accompany Ilsar’s pulsing electro baseline-heavy score and performance on drums.
One of the most beautiful moments comes when Smith moves from her chair to perform on the floor as digital sand fills the moon’s surface. Sheer joy washes through this captivating sequence in waves, one we’re later told relates to a teenage trip across the Nullarbor and feeling free as its healing dirt caressed her skin. Even without the artist sharing the specifics, the sentiments of what we witness are crystal clear, as when Xena rolls in from the wings and a pas de deux between the moon-bound Smith and her spiritual and physical extension begins in this multisensory ballet.
As an elemental reverie of a show that shimmers between forms, Conduit Bodies left tears dancing in my eyes and those of my plus-one. Its vast and ethereal beauty reminded me of the enslaved Caliban’s most remarkable speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds me thought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.”
As unbound words and flickering images, otherworldly music and earthy dance swirl as one in the hands of Smith, the darkness is dispelled, infinite possibility awakens, and a truly inclusive work of great hope, depth and meaning is born.
Conduit Bodies is playing at Arts House until October 13 and online until October 20. Get tickets here.
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