Under the volcano: Encountering La(r)val anxieties in Metal

Abstract

This article explores how recent intercultural contemporary concert dance collaborations in Asia and Australasia address questions of authorship and the subjectivity that concert dance performances produce. The work examined here is Metal (2020), created by Melbourne-based company Lucy Guerin Inc and Ensemble Tikoro, a heavy-metal choir based in West Java led by composer Robi Rusdiana. This work is critically analysed in terms of the production of subjectivity in dance and the influence of culture, politics and hegemonic regimes of representation in contemporary performance. Metal, which features five dancers and eight choir-members, was created in both Melbourne and Bandung. The work incorporates the aesthetics of heavy metal music culture; but it is a shadowy and decelerated piece. It has a quiet, disappearing-at-the-edges quality and a dramatic structure that develops through a series of enigmatic interactions between two groups. In these meetings, body practices and cultural practices are negotiated in a process of gradual unlearning, problematizing the conventions by which performers are turned into subjects. It is the depiction of solidities returning to a state of flux. The work was partly inspired by the place of its creation: the slopes of the active Tangkuban Perahu Volcano. Motifs of shifting earth and molten flows are referenced in both the composition of movement and sound, and in the work’s dramaturgical structure. As the work progresses, the fragments merge, culminating in a long series of tableaux performed in a wash of red light. In this volcanic scene, the performers are finally suspended in a state of potential subjectivity or becoming-individual. In this way, Metal points to the possibility of a choreographic practice that is a reversal and return to plurality, a subjectivity that is not multicultural but properly transcultural.