Sydney Reviews

For all their unpredictability, earthquakes have powerful and long-lasting results. The one which struck the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula in the winter of 1755 was so powerful it destroyed Lisbon and sent tsunamis to the southern coast of England and Ireland. Tremors were felt as far away as Finland and huge waves wrecked shipping in the harbours of the Caribbean and North Africa. Even the Italian lothario Casanova, imprisoned at the time in “The Leads” of Venice, claimed to have felt the earth move in his cell. Perhaps the most significant effects of the quake, however, were invisible. After the terrible fires and tsunami and the mountains of rubble, the Lisbon earthquake shook Europe’s moral philosophers as well. Leibniz optimistic claim – that “we live in the best of all possible worlds” – no longer stood so well. In his Poem On The Lisbon Disaster, Voltaire was moved to ask:

And can you then impute a sinful deed
To babes who on their mothers' bosoms bleed?
Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found,
Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?

So great, in fact, was the Earthquake’s effect on the Enlightenment that it is seen as a catalyst for Scepticism and Secularism more generally, and indeed for fundamentally destroying the expectation in the European mind of divine protection.

The latest offering at the Roslyn Packer Theatre is Fault Lines, a piece of contemporary dance composed in response to the experience of two modern earthquakes: Christchurch and Sichuan. Choreographed by Sara Brodie of New Zealand and performed by the Leshan Song and Dance Troupe of Sichuan Province, Fault Lines is subtle, elegant, and thoroughly exquisite to behold.

Drawing on the stylized vocabulary of traditional Chinese dance and ballet Brodie bends both into something contemporary and deeply felt. Shuddering on the ground as interlocking tectonic plates or rising in magma-like convections beneath the Earth’s crust these dancers evoke plutonic power and titanic scale. But just as quickly they dissolve: into a wave, or electricity, pulsating across a seismograph. As suddenly: a funerary procession, or an angry crowd. “Hey! No rubbernecking!” They yell at the audience with irony. Then we enter the human dimension. A bunch of Chinese yuppies on their mobile phones becomes a tragedy of souls departing broken bodies, or limbs crushed by dense rubble; a population of refugees, a wave of misery.

The images conjured by Fault Lines are scientific, microscopic, demographic and mytho-poetic (an ancient white-god appears in imperial silks drawing down mana from the sky). A progress of vivid impressions is defined, as if by magic, by human hands and arms, heads and feet, by movement, swinging bodies, dynamic then suddenly still. Lights, stellar in their precision, illuminate the action or reveal in black silhouette. The result is art both unexpected, beautiful and largely incommunicable. Earthquakes terrify us because we cannot control or predict them. All the way from China, these dancers seem to tell us that while we might not live in the “best of all possible worlds” we are not alone in fearing what we do not understand.


Ausfeng Events presents
Fault Lines
Leshan Song & Dance Troupe

Sydney
Venue: Roslyn Packer Theatre, 22 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
Dates: Thurs 11 June & Friday 12 June 7:30pm; Sat 13 June 1:30pm & 7:30pm
Tickets: $39 – $99
Booking: www.roslynpackertheatre.com.au | 9250 1999

Canberra
Venue: The Play House, Canberra Theatre Centre
Dates: Monday 15 June & Tuesday 16 June 7:30pm
Tickets: $39 – $69
Booking: www.canberratheatrecentre.com.au | 02 6275 2700