Review: INFINITELY CLOSER – OZASIA FESTIVAL 2023 at Adelaide Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ray Smith Thursday 27th October 2023.

As my guest and I collected our tickets to see Infinitely Closer, by The Human Expression (T.H.E.) Dance Company, I was surprised to be told that all audience members would be entering the capacious theatre through Door 3. Given that the Festival Theatre has a capacity of almost 2000, I had visions of a gigantic flock of sheep being herded through a single gate in the middle of the outback by a pack of working dogs, but then I noticed that the normally bustling pre-show foyer was all but empty, leaving the bar unusually, and thankfully, easy to access.

The performance was scheduled to start at 7.30, but the doors remained steadfastly shut until almost 7.20, where a small crowd of people waited rather impatiently to take their seats. The whole thing seemed rather odd and, as we queued to enter, I glanced at our tickets to see that this was a general admission show, and that no seat numbers were allocated. There were still several dozen punters in front of us when the tannoy warned that the show would start in 3 minutes and, after a bit of shuffling forward, 2 minutes. By the time our tickets were checked, the warning was for just 1 minute, and it was then that I could see that the entire theatre was empty.

We were directed down the steps at the very edge of the theatre to a mysterious small open door to our left, it was one of those side doors in large theatres that one often wonders about while sitting waiting for a performance to start. We found ourselves in the dim and rather time-worn and shabby backstage area before being led onto the Festival Theatre stage itself, where seating had been arranged around its edges. In the centre stood three large transparent screens, covered in projected images, arranged to form a small triangular space in the centre and fanned out to dissect the performance area into 3 spaces.

In the small central space stood a lone dancer, and in each of the three segments of the stage, two others. The soundtrack began at extraordinary volume and that was the first time, but certainly not the last, that I saw a number of members of the audience put their fingers in their ears.

The dancers exploded into a frenzy of motion and appeared to be in a state of great agony or grief, and I certainly felt for them as the soundscape burst into even greater volume, sounding like a hundred dial-up modems completely out of synch, accompanied by the random bashings and crashings of a dozen MRI machines magnetically intruding into the bodies of their victims. It was ghastly.

The frenzied acrobatics of the extremely talented dancers continued apace, but I was completely unable to discern why. They began to move the screens, slowly at first, releasing the trapped figure inside, and then, at breakneck speed, around the performance space, threatening to have the damned things topple into a section of the audience or slice through one of the other dancers, and I still could not work out why.

There were some slower sections, interminably slow, but at least the soundtrack calmed down for a bit. I couldn't help but notice members of the audience checking their watches and attempting to stifle yawns, once they had pulled their fingers out of their ears.

The blurb on the OzAsia website boasted, “enthralling holographic visuals” but they were just overlapping two-dimensional video projections. The blurb's statement of “the immersive sonic waves of three-dimensional sound” was simply surround sound that the well-heeled have had in their home entertainment areas for a decade or more. The “level of audience engagement rarely seen in contemporary dance” involved the dancers leading a few hapless audience members into the performance area at the very end of the show to stand about wondering why they were there.

It was dreadful, but people are strange, and after a smattering of applause the dancers began their bows and many members of the audience got to their feet and whooped and shouted, still yawning and checking their watches, while I reassured my guest that she could at last stop gnawing her own feet off.

Photography, Crispian Chan.