Home - what the reviewers thought
Home and hosed - the show is over and it was a ripping success. lots of happy audiences and dancers, full tummies on yummy home recipe group titbits, tired by satisfied bodies, tonnes of great feedback, tears and fond fairwells.
here’s some bits from our review in The Age:
“Stompin takes their audiences on a tour through time and space in an immersive presentation that celebrates the bonds of community built around family, food and dance. In this close-up performance, the dancers are in the audience’s face. They stomp across the dining table at which we are seated, surge across the bedroom, forcing us backwards, colliding, to grapple and collapse, or conducting intimate non-verbal conversations with looks that could kill. Home is a thoroughly engaging encounter. Stompin is bursting with ideas and a terrific Tassie export.” - Hilary Crampton, The Age, 14 Sept 07.
and some stuff from Australian Stage Online:
“Audience members are subject to a rollercoaster of emotions as they move from room to room; from start to finish, the sense of anticipation and curiosity the work provokes is intense… Home is a rich hothouse of personal experience and intimate memories made physical… The conviction and depth of these young performers was impressive, the set an ingenious concept taking the movement to a new level. Here’s to many more return seasons of this stirring, engaging work!” - Jessica Thomson, Australian Stage Online 19 September 2007
Read the entire reviews…
Dancing Tassie Devils
DANCE
Home: Review – Hilary Crampton, The Age. Friday 14 September 2007
WHAT is home? Security, familiarity, lifestyle, the ups and downs of family life? Tasmanian youth dance group Stompin takes their audiences on a tour through time and space in an immersive presentation that celebrates the bonds of community built around family, food and dance.
Home, designed by students from the University of Tasmania’s school of architecture, consists of a 21st-century living room, white walls and light screens; a dining room combining formality with nostalgic clutter; a kitchen crammed with accoutrements of 1950s domestic bliss; a bathroom place of pampering but also fear and loathing and a cosy bedroom that expands into a shadowy nightmare world.
In this close-up performance, the dancers are in the audience’s face. They stomp across the dining table at which we are seated, surge across the bedroom, forcing us backwards, colliding, to grapple and collapse, or conducting intimate non-verbal conversations with looks that could kill.
Outside this home is a convivial meeting place, where the waiting crowds can gather around a table and share in food and conversation specially prepared by a group of women recruited from the community.
It reinforces the means by which family and community are built dining, dancing, celebrating and gets us in the mood for our tour.
Co-created by Luke George and Bec Reid, with sound composition by Luke Smiles and lighting design by Benjamin Cisterne, Home is a thoroughly engaging encounter. Stompin is a youth group bursting with ideas and a terrific Tassie export.
| Home | Stompin |
| Written by Jessica Thomson | |
| Wednesday, 19 September 2007 | |
| There is so much to like about this sprawling, innovative ‘performance installation’ from Stompin. As creators of site-specific, large-scale work, the Launceston-based company for young dancers rarely brings its work interstate – I count myself lucky to have experienced this recent Melbourne season of Home.Originally created in 2006 by artistic director Luke George and former co-artistic director Bec Reid for an acclaimed Launceston season at Roberts Wool Store, ‘Home’ is performed in an ingenious 40 metre-long recycled cardboard house created by architecture students from the University of Tasmania.
North Melbourne’s old Meat Market – recently converted into a cavernous performance venue – served as an ideal space to reassemble the set for this second incarnation of the work, which combined some new Melbourne dancers together with performers from the original cast to make up the 26-strong cast. In a format reminiscent of a theme park ride, the show departs every five minutes with a guiding dancer leading a party of ten people through the house. Audience members are subject to a rollercoaster of emotions as they move from room to room; from start to finish, the sense of anticipation and curiosity the work provokes is intense. Inspired by ‘the place we live and the living we create’, for the dancers Home is a rich hothouse of personal experience and intimate memories made physical: the sense of dislocation and frustration of the living room, where the line between reality and unreality is blurred; the dinner-party-turned-nasty of the dining room (awesome, committed performances from Zac Lister, Alison Orr and Madeline Huett) which made for seductive viewing; the immaculate, all-smiling, happy families, 1950’s-inspired superficiality of the kitchen; a gripping bathroom solo from guiding dancer Georgie Midson, trapped in a shower at the mercy of her anxiety and fears, an animal in captivity; the dream-like state of the bedroom – transient, removed. The conviction and depth of these young performers was impressive, the set an ingenious concept taking the movement to a new level. Here’s to many more return seasons of this stirring, engaging work! |
18 September 2007 at 10:15 pm
I wish I had been able to make it! Well done on The Age Review!! Best of luck in next endeavours! PLEASE come back to Sydney at some point!!!