Mermermer 2016
Chunky Move's ninth Next Move performance season was the world premiere double bill of Melanie Lane's Re-Make and Jo Lloyd's Mermermer. With Re-make, choreographer Lane embarked on a long awaited collaboration with former Australian Ballet Senior Artist Juliet Burnett. Through narrative, space and technology, Re-make negotiated tradition, discipline and the future of the highly trained classical body. Contemplating the language, craft and technology of the classically trained body, Lane and Burnett created a solo for two – an excavation of physical archives that are shared and negotiated through their encounter with one another.
Another deep collaboration, Mermermer was created and performed by choreographer Jo Lloyd and performance maker Nicola Gunn. The work was simultaneously a physical and verbal conversation, a new mode of performance that explored saturation, social encounters and an augmented reality that oscillated somewhere between high art and entertainment. Drawing on ideas of extinction, documentation and myth-making, the outcome was a phantasmagoria of a work, exploring saturation, augmented realities and the irresolvable tension created by the gap between live mediation, mediated non-fiction and melodrama.
Creative Team
Concept, Direction & Choreography Jo Lloyd & Nicola Gunn
Lighting Design Matthew Adey/House of Vnholy
Composition & Sound Design Duane Morrison
Costume Design Shio Otani
Original Performers Jo Lloyd, Nicola Gunn
Artistic Director Anouk van Dijk
Executive Director Vanessa Pigrum
Company Producer Hillary Coyne
Production Manager Michael Carr
Stage Manager Jess Frost
Lighting Operator Andre Vanderwert
World Premiere
9 September 2016 Melbourne
Awards
2017 Green Room Award For Music Composition and Sound Design (Duane Morrison)
"Witty, joyous and disconcerting, Mermermer blends the irreverent, absurd and everyday into a quirky style of comedic physical theatre." The Australian.
A note from the choreographer
The initial impulse behind Mermermer was around ideas of melodrama, extinction, documentation and myth-making. We entertained several possible titles for the work including Reverie, Queens on a Rug, Queens Talking Shit on a Rug, In On It, Education Yes! and finally settled on Mermermer. MERMER (memory and encoding related multifaceted electroencephalographic responses) is a brain response to a forensic science technique used to determine whether specific information is stored in the subject’s brain, otherwise known as ‘brain fingerprinting.’ In English, the term memoir comes directly from the French for memory, mémoire, a word that is derived from the Latin for the same memoria. Embedded in Latin’s memoria is the ancient Greek mérmeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian mermara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mer-mer, “to vividly wonder,” “to be anxious,” “to exhaustingly ponder.” And of course, la mer is French for “the sea.” We hoped to make a phantasmagoria of a work, exploring saturation, augmented realities and the irresolvable tension created by the gap between live mediation, mediated non-fiction and melodrama. The interpretation is open to continual reassessment and the work itself is in perpetual flux as we find ways to function in and negotiate with the present.
L-R: Jo Lloyd, Nicola Gunn Image: Gregory Lorenzutti
