For Ten Days on the Island Arts Festival, Life/Cycle welcomes its audience into the old Mercury print hall, an industrial space, now darkened and empty. As the audience walks to their seats, they see only the presence of women sitting in the shadows of this disused factory site, once the sole domain of men. The women who are at a distance - sit next to bicycle wheels staged like Marcel Duchamp's readymades. As a precursor to the performance, the women whimsically spin the wheels and seem engaged with these objects, yet remain aloof to the audience passing by.
Life/Cycle is billed as 'The final instalment of The Black Dog Trilogy, LIFE/CYCLE draws inspiration from Marjorie Bligh, Tasmania's legendary housewife and recycling pioneer'. A beautifully crafted piece by Jane Longhurst and a team of creatives, Life/Cycle uses a collage of elements: dance, projection, soundscapes, smatterings of dialogue, strategic set design, blocking and costuming to interrogate the cyclic manifestations of domestic violence in men and women's lives.
In Life/Cycle, domestic violence is examined from a female gaze, as a mass produced 1950s object. As an object, domestic violence currently comes with strong, governmental, mass produced messaging, and it is this meaning making, when curated and placed in a pop-up theatre such as The Mercury Building in Hobart, inadvertently challenges the audience to reframe this object of examination.
It's a telling fact that men are absent upon the audience's entry - and then only appear in this work as negative players. The presence of a young boy, skilfully performed by Patrick Molony - who is soon automated by social media and a TikTok dance he and the other young man, Finley Gorringe, perform for their mobile phone - is a reminder of how we more often than not, become what we see role modelled to us.
Though recently this cyclic understanding of domestic violence has been up for grabs, the establishment - both in the arts and other institutions, continues to present a narrative which draws a threaded line from the 1950s western stereotypes of female domesticity and gender roles, to this dire outcome today.
The Launceston Queen Victoria Museum in 2020 celebrated Margorie Bligh’s legacy in an exhibition titled, ‘Marjorie Bligh - Domestic Goddess’. Donated all of her collection ‘but only keeping some’ the museum focused on her ability to recycle and recreate from waste. Though Bligh was more often than not mocked by the artistic elites, no more so than by Barry Humphries who it is said drew inspiration for his Dame Edna character, there’s a sense Life/Cycle sees what she epitomised as implicated in the trapped circumstances some women find themselves in. I am unsure whether Mrs Bligh was ever a victim of domestic violence, but I do know that despite her remarkable gifts and talents as a business woman, writer, gardener and artist, she remained on the fringes of Tasmanian artistic circles. Her legacy is tapped into to inform Life/Cycle, but it's unclear whether the work is suspicious of the contributing factor her type of role modelling makes to the domestic violence dynamic or if it is disparaging of the traditional female roles Bligh embraced and celebrated: being a mother, home-maker, wife, carer and home-remedy expert.
Nonetheless, this cause and effect is symbolised by the exquisite 1950s costuming and the articulate choreography of Felicity Bott, using animated 1950s mannequin/homemaking gestures, beautifully performed by Mature Artists Dance Experience (MADE) dancers. The repetition of movements, often along a cyclic floor plan, which in turn constructs the domestic set, impresses to the audience how certain expectations and stereotypes, honed from an era long past, continue to build a dynamic for domestic violence to exist today, reinforced by social media rather than the Australian Woman’s Weekly.
Longhurst's blocking and direction is powerful in presenting this idea, especially in relation to the young boy - who at one stage plays with stereotypes, and seemingly flirts with drag: a poignant reminder of how stereotypes as definers of both men and women's identities has become pervasive, especially in relation to the current gender wars and the claim that women are a constructed concept open to boys and men to inhabit.
Finley Gorringe as the young man, uses explosive, unpredictable and gravity defying parkour movements to present a display of masculine power over the domestic sphere. Together with Longhurst's sparse dialogue, with projected visuals of bike wheels, open and closed doors and the ever present menace of violence, projected onto the back wall as a small handgun - these all combine to create a menacing, on-edge atmosphere, culminating in the clanging disintegration of the stage set, puppeteers by a man above.
The steely gazed female protagonist, performed by Carrie McLean, effectively expresses the unspoken visceral anxiety and rage of women, living their ‘best lives’ in quiet desperation. This is supported by Luka Duncanson, as 'the girl', whose focused, still-presence throughout, with the symbolic pairing of her with the bicycle at the beginning and end, together with the generated lightbulb energy she creates when cycling, enables the work to carry forward an idea of domestic violence's generational, inescapable nature.
Life/Cycle holds so many poignant visuals: a stage floor space drawn as a blue-print housing plan, the peeling of a boiled egg - a new life not yet born but 'cooked', bicycles ridden when young, but held stationary as women age, and the parkour agility of Gorringe, who represent men's ability to physically extract themselves literally from the scene, whilst women are held in place. This is underscored by the beautiful, still-life gazing face of MADE dancer Annie Greenhill, throughout the entire performance.
Added to this are powerful elements of suicidal nihilism and violence, confronted using projections and lighting blackouts. This is further outworked in the dark but humorous duo between Gorringe and Maloney.
Felicity Bott's mesmorising choreography in the ‘women’s saucepan dance’ has Pina Bausch and Sylvia Plath overtones. The bleak existentialists comment on women's lives, is ever-present, with movements etiquette-laced and reminiscent of the mundane, rhythmic drudgery of never ending cooking and cleaning: peaked by a trio tableau, of head- in- saucepan dancers, echoing Plath’s tragic end.
The sound effects of Guy Hooper who oversees the space from on high, is apt and telling in its sprinkling of domestic creaks and tinkerings over the space: given more meaning via Hooper’s elevated placement above the trapped lives below.
Life/Cycle underscores how the accepted voices in our society currently see the causes, experiences and cycles of domestic violence, as well as the effect it has on men and women generationally. It’s only the space that enables Longhurst ‘s ‘ready made’ perspective to be questioned and I am unsure of whether this is intentional.
The inked handprints up high on the walls of the Mercury building, made by the men who used to work there decades before, acts as a poignant reminder of the lives and voices of men, often not explored. The Mercury building, like so many factory sites, was once a site filled with men who found their value and identities from their ability to work in jobs requiring physical strength, to manage the machinery and tonnage weight of paper rolls, used to print the Hobart Mercury newspaper on.
The visual of Gorringe's spiderman movements, as he rock climbed across the wall of the Mercury building during the performance, trying to reach a protruding nail, but then hanging and ultimately falling from a steel ledge left over from the factory's infrastructure, was a haunting gesture of how men have lost their place: physically and mentally, with no heel-hook to swing to.