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Left - Wendy Houstoun. Photos - Carla Gottgens

I didn’t know what to expect from this solo performance by UK dance/physical theatre/performance artist Wendy Houstoun. I figured there would be some talking, some movement, maybe some character work, but I didn’t expect a dance work, as such.

Funnily enough, Desert Island Dances is, among other things, a work about expectation, not necessarily just in a show, but in life. From the beginning, Houstoun plays with this concept, perhaps suggesting that very little is ever really as it seems. Nothing really lives up to expectation, anyway. She walks onto stage in very ordinary clothes - completely pedestrian, and draws a large palm tree with a piece of chalk. She picks up a boom box and turns on recorded sounds of a calm ocean.

Is this all we are going to get? Is this our lush desert island? Houstoun describes this island, but she keeps changing her narrative. It’s a relaxed, peaceful, empty island….well, actually, there’s a low flying plane coming dangerously close. There are no clouds in the sky, but, wait….if there were…..

Houstoun draws a chalk circle on the floor – the schoolyard, she tells us. Has our expectation shifted? Here she offers movement more than words, a strong sequence of straight-bodied falls to the ground, quick recoveries and rolling. Is this an interpretation of a hopscotch game?

She wanders over to a video camera and watches back the performance thus far, charting an “expectation graph” with her chalk and comments on her own performance. The graph has peaks and troughs, much like a stock portfolio highlighting gains and losses.

It takes an extremely experienced and clever performance maker to construct a show like Desert Island Dances. It wouldn’t work in lesser hands. Even though her scenarios and the whole structure of this solo are so contrived, there is something quite honest, and genuinely humourous in Houstoun’s performance. She truly succeeds in using both her body and her words to articulate the experience she is describing while simultaneously subverting the whole scenario by exposing to us all the ways it could have been better, different or more spectacular.

She cuts everything right down – her boat is no luxury liner, but a wooden crate on wheels that she physically gets into and pushes around with the force of her body. A 12 step plan becomes a 10 step plan and even the chalk she uses was supposed to be that cool, glow chalk. But alas it is not….

In the end, we are left with Houstoun herself telling us about the show we were going to see. “You’d have loved it,” she says.

But we did love it…just as it was.


Melbourne International Arts Festival presents
Desert Island Dances
Wendy Houstoun

Venue: the Arts Centre, Fairfax Studio
When: Thu 9 – Mon 13 Oct at 9pm
Duration: 1hr no interval
Prices: Full $35 / Groups (8+) $31.50 / Conc $26.25 / Student/MF-Y $25
Bookings: Ticketmaster 1300 136 166 | www.melbournefestival.com.au