Realtime review: Emptying The Bucket
“A work of great complexity and depth, with multiple layers and intersecting patterns.”
Originally published on realtime.org.au
Nebahat Erpolat’s Emptying the Bucket is nothing if not enigmatic. It has the density and seriousness and mystery of a Zen koan. And, indeed, it could be that the title of the piece is a lateral reference to the 13th century Zen abbess Mugai Nyodai, who is said to have achieved enlightenment when the bottom fell out of an old bamboo bucket she was carrying.
In any case, this is a work which inspires doubt. Erpolat describes Emptying the Bucket as a meditation on love, and yet it’s shot through with images and rhythms suggesting disconnection and loneliness.
The four dancers seem to move in different spheres, and it is only with the greatest effort that they are able to force a connection. Harrison Ritchie-Jones, in skinny jeans and t-shirt, jives and bops as if listening to his own private mix tape. Josh Twee watches and broods and moves in sudden jerks and leaps. Eventually, he throws himself at Ritchie-Jones, pushing him to the ground, clinging to his legs in a paroxysm of desire. Ritchie-Jones barely seems to notice.
Emma Riches, improbably costumed as a cheerleader without the pompoms, performs lyrical fragments in isolation, only fleetingly joined in awkward duets. At one point, Ritchie-Jones holds Riches horizontally across his chest, using her leg like an implement to point at and push Twee.
Meanwhile, Sheridan Gerrard looks on mournfully; at intervals, she leaves the stage and jogs around the theatre space, including the audience within the rune-like scheme of the performance. The stage itself is bare, austerely lit in blue. The exposed stage rig looms like a skeleton in a museum. Moments of extreme stillness give way to heavy stamping and screaming. All the performers search for a new formula for the pas de deux of love, but it remains elusive.
The piece won the Fringe Award for Best Dance, and it’s clearly a work of great complexity and depth, with multiple layers and intersecting patterns. There is confusion in the restless shuffling of bodies and the energetic surges, and there’s plenty of theatricality, but there is also the rigorism of a choreographer who wants every shape to be just so.
As the contents of the metaphorical bucket pour forth we hear a string quartet by Schubert accompanied with swirls of dissonant noise. Perhaps what we’re seeing is a performance which empties all the false sentiments and images of romance and leaves us with a bare theatre and separately thrashing bodies. As the abbess Nyodai wrote: “No more water in the bucket; / No more moon in the water.”
Read more about the work
Emptying the BucKET
A meditation on love.
