Universal Drive is a new addition to Tempo's dance festival formula, continuing on from its Fresh Cuts and Prime Cuts which have so successfully enabled, in previous years, newly emerging choreographers and those reaching their prime to show what they are up to in combined programmes of shorter works.
UniversalDrive provides for established choreographers to present some longer and more fully developed work.
First up in 2010 are Kiwi Anna Bate and Melbourne's Tim Podestra with two half-hour long and wildly disparate works.
Podestra's Visceral is "an abstract exploration of the deeply felt, instinctive responses of the human mind".
His six very young looking but highly skilled and well-disciplined dancers take to the stage in identical and rather wholesome-looking knickers and vest sets in a vague palette of marled pastel. Their music ranges from Max Richter's Infra and The Chameleon Project by Christopher Harrison to Rachmaninov.
It is a fluid and almost hypnotic performance. Podestra's vocabulary is one of complex interchange and clever and original lifts, all performed with aplomb and expertise.
There are moments of intense interest - a body flying backwards through the air to waiting arms, against the general flow - and of some irritation. In a long section of marking time, there is one prominently and definitively marking out-of-time.
But there is a uniformity throughout that tests the attention and a lack of any perceived destination.
Anna Bate's Pro-Posing, in complete contrast, explores "the action of a pose, a front and a facade as obvious faces of change", embodied by a trio of luscious ladies: Bate herself plus the fierce-eyed Mariana Rinaldi and Kerryn McMurdo.
Glamorously encased in what look like control undergarments in flesh tones, enhanced by black bras and variously adorned with shirts, gaucho pants on occasion, and an exuberance of coloured tinsel, the ladies take on the posture of body builder, pro-wrestler, Spice Girl and beyond.
It is a hoot, a great belly laugh. But their OTT hilarity is balanced by their ultra-clever comedic nuance, great timing, an interesting sound track and their sheer ability to take an audience with them.
