Dance performance Extra Ordinary Folk features everyday actions and interactions to create mesmierising performance. Photo / Amanda Billing
Ordinary, everyday movement becomes absorbing art in Extra Ordinary Folk, by Fidget Collective and guests in the vast Corban Estate Arts Centre's Shed 1.
More of a mesmerising performance installation, it was collectively developed under the direction of Claire O'Neil and exploits the 30m long stage to great effect, providing
wonderful vistas that play with scale and enable strange juxtapositions of people and objects.
The core performers are dancers and sound artists with rich experience in real-time composition, plus guest performers drawn from community dance groups. They wear an ever-changing array of T-shirts, with labels referring to the social roles they play ranging from the everyday to the less ordinary such as Friend, Beneficiary, Life Model, Administrator, Home Owner and Head Girl. Though not specifically playing these parts, the labels remind us of the multiple roles each of us play in our own lives.
Performance zones are temporarily marked out on the floor with masking tape and orange hazard cones. Always on the move, the tape and cones are accompanied by a series of tables and chairs, plastic crates, a large potted plant and empty mirror frames on castor wheels, one of which is limned in LEDs. These zones become rooms where meals are eaten, grooming occurs, work is done, families squabble, games are played, speeches are delivered and solitary quiet time is enjoyed.
Intriguing vignettes feature every once in a while. Aloalii Tapu conducts an auction for scarce fragments of now extremely collectible plastic chairs; Tallulah Holy-Massey lounges restlessly in a chair as she contemplates her life. There's a rambling collective soccer game and a sudden outbreak of one-on-one aggression.
