Not your typical running club (the nudity is the giveaway)

DANCE
Mass Effect
New Theatre
September 17 to 20
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★

HIMHERANDIT Productions might have flown from Denmark to perform at the Sydney Fringe Festival, but anyone who has ever done a Les Mills gym class or joined a running club will feel like they’re with old friends. This is because the lighthearted Mass Effect (choreographed by Andreas Constantinou) really makes you think about cardiovascular fitness.

Mass Effect really makes you think about cardiovascular fitness.Credit: Allan Høgholm

Mass Effect features five dancers in monochrome gymwear and sneakers, starting with a slow warm-up of pivots on the balls of their feet, gradually progressing to fullblown sprints. They run in increasingly complex patterns, circling each other and pivoting in zigzags across the stage, all while keeping count to the repeated “thud thud thud” of their sneakers striking the floor.

The rhythmic sound, and the sight of bodies sprinting in well-trained unison, becomes hypnotic and invigorating. They begin breathing loudly in synchrony, the breaths layering over the sneaker-thudding, growing to vocal percussion then finally a symphony of coordinated yells and loud gasps. By this point the sprinting’s thumping energy has accumulated into The Rite of Spring as the dancers begin flinging their limbs with wild abandon.

The rhythmic sound, and the sight of bodies sprinting in well-trained unison, becomes hypnotic. Credit: Allan Høgholm

Then – just like in a HIIT class – everything abruptly stops and the dancers take a short, gasping drink break stage front. With every break, their faces grow more flushed and their gymwear more transparent from sweat. Eventually, they just start peeling off their clothing altogether, as more dancers stream on stage and start stripping off.

Les Mills via The Rite of Spring has now evolved into a nudist rave. Electronic music blasts out of the theatre speakers. With all that relentless rhythmic jogging, jumping, and limb-flinging, nobody’s upper or lower private parts are spared an unforgiving jolting.

Mass Effect is all about the adrenaline of synchronised movement. It’s initially fun, clever stuff, but the mass nudity and electromusic at the end starts to feel disappointingly like a typical modern dance gimmick – is it really creating extra meaning properly, or is it more over-reliance on easy provocative techniques?

The work closes with the dancers standing in a mostly nude row, flushed with adrenaline and the joy of exertion. One gives a speech about how Mass Effect is about togetherness and giving voice to oppressed minorities, with one dancer waving a Pride flag and another a Free Palestine flag. It’s a reminder – in case we could forget – that this is not your typical running club.

MUSIC
Sibelius and Wagner
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Donald Runnicles
Sydney Opera House. September 18
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Donald Runnicles and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra gave a glowing performance of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, shaping its abundant melodic riches with warmth and an astute understanding of the way its lapidary structure unfolds. This is a work whose revelations creep up on you, like an unexpected tree or vista on a walk, only to recede just as quickly.

Runnicles brought forth the gently surging pulsations of the opening with quiet buoyancy, and the ensuing woodwind idea entered brightly but at a distance. The violins, under concertmaster Andrew Haveron introduced more urgent animation and captured a point of vertiginous intensity at the climactic point of the phrase, as though arriving at a breathtaking panorama.

Donald Runnicles conducts the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.Credit: Craig Abercrombie

The slow movement was dark but never self-indulgent. The portentous bassoon solo (Matthew Wilkie) emerged over the top of an almost inaudible plucked tread from cellos and basses as though a thought had suddenly crystallised. But perhaps the symphony’s most beautiful moment was the oboe theme (Shefali Pryor) ushered into the middle section of the third movement, which, up to this point had bristled with scurrying energy from the strings.

This melody is of such disarmingly simple beauty, one scarcely notices that it is built on themes of the first movement, including the symphony’s opening notes. This is perhaps the kind of integration Sibelius was referring to when he later remarked to Gustav Mahler that what he liked about symphonic works was the profound logic that created an inner connection between its motives (Mahler famously answered, “No, the symphony must be like the world”).

For the finale, Sibelius conceived two imposing but contrasting ideas, the first of surging exaltation, the second of implacable sternness and quiet resolve that grows to become overwhelming. Runnicles guided both so that the expressiveness was exhilarating, but never over-inflated.

The danger of arriving at the closing passages with the feeling that all the fireworks have already been let off, which is sometimes a problem with this work in less experienced hands, was avoided here and the performance closed in radiant magnificence.

Before this, Runnicles and the SSO articulated the tempestuous outer textures and tender contrasting cor anglais melody (Alexandre Oguey) of Wagner’s Overture to the Flying Dutchman with musicianly care, moulding brass chords carefully so the turbulence was incisive but not allowed to unbalance the texture or run amok. The program is repeated on Friday and Saturday with the added bonus of mezzo-soprano Sasha Cook in Elgar’s Sea Pictures.

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