[2015044] HEX
James Welsby @ Royal Croquet Club – The Black Box
11:00pm, Wed 18 Feb 2015
It had not ben a great night of entertainment thus far, and I found myself running – well, jogging at a fair clip – halfway across a humid city to make it to HEX on time. I arrived just as the tail of the queue entered The Black Box, so I took a seat on an aisle and waited for the torrent of sweat to begin. And, as I waited, I tried to recollect what I knew about HEX… and the answer was a big fat bugger all. It had been heavily recommended by multiple friends, and it was supposedly a dance performance… but that was all the knowledge I had prior to the performance.
The lights drop, and there’s a few “woo!”s from the boisterous opening-night crowd. Low notes start playing, and everything starts feeling ominous. An immediately identifiable Grim Reaper very deliberately makes its way to the centre of the stage. Everything becomes super ominous.
And then a massive disco freakout happens. And it was glorious.
All of a sudden, HEX became an almost aggressively joyful dance piece… and the dancers (director/choreographer James Welsby, James Andrews, and Chafia Brooks) were excellent. The choreography makes full use of the space (and leverages the raked seating), creating a very dynamic performance. And Claudio Tocco’s sound design – including the gorgeous noise texture piece in the middle of the show – was absolutely perfect.
It struck me (within the opening third) that The Grim Reaper reminded me of the old AIDS awareness ads that ran on TV when I was in high school… and then it all made sense. HEX felt like a stylised peek at late-eighties gay club culture: the exuberance of the opening third, the powerful realisation of the threat accompanies the textured middle, with a bit of reclamation in the final act. The symbolic snapping of the Reaper’s scythe at the end of the show intimates that lessons have been learnt, and the spirit will not be dominated.
Even if I’ve got the message all wrong, I love love loved HEX. It was smart, it was funny, it was playful, it was bleak; and, most of all, it was genuinely exciting dance and movement.
(44) HEX: Stunning dance piece that visually explores the AIDS crisis retrospectively. Absolutely enthralling. #ff2015 #ADLfringe
— Pete Muller (@festivalfreakAU) February 18, 2015