As STEPS Youth Dance Company enters its 20th anniversary year it’s all set to dive headfirst into the dichotomy that is gender and whether the polarity of male and female is still evident today… or whether the lines have blurred. For 16 year old dancer Tyrone Robinson it’s an opportunity to put new found skills to the test. After all, Robinson has just been accepted into the Advanced Diploma of Dance at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) and by the start of next year will commence his BA in Dance.
Robinson is thrilled to be at uni at such a young age. Add the fact that he’s currently working for Alice Lee Holland – the new artistic director over at STEPS and Robinson’s purported idol – and one could say Robinson’s life is going swimmingly.
Robinson is yet more proof that when posed with the question ‘so you think you can dance?’ more and more males are turning around and simply saying ‘yes, I sure can’. And for all the stigma male dancers have slung at them you can’t help but marvel at the dexterity and ingenuity such dancers lend to the form. But what is contemporary dance?
‘I define contemporary dance as a bit of everything mashed into one genre but in an abstract sense, so nothing is what it is. It takes from everything so you’ve got moves from different genres all coming together and it’s all abstract movement to portray a story. I like the idea of not being stuck in one set of movements.’
Robinson is about to take a dive in the deep end when he appears in STEPS’ new work Moonwebs and Scorched Thongs. The piece explores the yin and yang of gender, from the delicate yet inherent strength of a moonweb to the yobbish slouchiness of scorched thongs dragging through the dirt.
‘It’s a dance focusing on gender and what it means to be a boy and what it means to be a girl,’ Robinson explained. ‘It makes the transition from the old views on what it meant to be those two genders to what’s more accepted nowadays, so it focuses on how to be a boy you needed to be rugged and masculine and how to be a girl was to be feminine and then it transitions to the end where the boys start being more feminine and the girls start being more masculine to show what it is like today and what is more accepted in the genders.’
In the process of creating the piece, the dancers were asked to bring in cultural references as a start pointing for discussion, with those references being anything from poems to headlines to pictures. Straight away Robinson tapped into the cultural pulse and examined alcoholic beverages and how they are blatantly geared toward being either a male drink or a female drink. Not bad for someone who is still well and truly under the legal drinking age.
‘I thought along the lines of what we considered to be the stereotypes of male and female. One of them that came up was the drinks, or alcohol, and how to be a man you have to order beer or vodka or straight up drinks and to be a girl you have to order the more tasty drinks. And then I found a quotation on a Yahoo chat site and somebody said ‘a man drink is a drink where you’re supposed to make an ugly face and it’s not supposed to taste good and a feminine drink is supposed to be the best drink in the world’.’
The work involves approximately 28 dancers, 14 of whom are male and 14 who are female. The set has been created by local award-winning wunderkind Brian Woltjen while choreography has been handed over, in part, to special guest choreographer Paul Zivkovich who joins Sydney Dance Company straight after his intensive rehearsal process with this show. Add the sheer volume of dancers involved in this production and the fact that they are all under the age of 20 and Moonwebs and Scorched Thongs is ambitious to say the least.
‘It’s quite daunting not only for the dancers but the choreographers. They point out to us how difficult it is to coordinate so many dancers and that we all have to be paying attention or else it can quickly fall apart. So it is a lot to take in. But it does give you a sense of spatial awareness which is really, really important when you become a professional dancer.’
Moonwebs and Scorched Thongs opens at Playhouse Theatre on April 3 and runs until April 6. For further information please visit www.stepsyouthdance.com.au, otherwise tickets are available now online from www.bocsticketing.com.au.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
