February 29, 2012
Adelaide Festival

Malmo
Torque Show
Presented by Vitalstatistix Theatre Company
in association with Adelaide Festival
Waterside, Port Adelaide.
February 28. Tickets : $ 25 – $35
Bookings: BASS 131 246, adelaidefestival.com.au
Until March 4.

“This is not a house, it’s a machine for living” the bright young couple exults, “It is a 3D mirror of who you are.” Malmo, a dance theatre work devised by performers Vincent Crowley and Ingrid Weisfelt, along with director Ross Ganf, takes a long, often comical look at the social ritual of home renovation.

The audience is in promenade in the vast space of the Waterside Workers Hall. Taking up and putting down our little stools, we are led through imaginary rooms as our eager hosts – he in waistcoat and black slacks, she with neck scarf, striped top and mustard trousers – elaborate feverishly on the particulars of their home creation.

To illustrate their comments we are referred to our individually supplied copies of Malmo, a droll, wickedly concocted satiric send-up of any number of lifestyle and architectural magazines, which has chosen their house for its monthly feature. The design accents are Scandinavian, of course, and evoke the familiar consumer paradise of the flat pack and the Allen key, but as they rhapsodise fatuously about “rooms for the imagination” we realize they really believe their own mantra that “your house says – Me Me Me.”

Interspersed with the cheeky send-up of interior narcissism, the performers lucidly choreograph their changing moods – from the breezy harmony of their project-based universe-of-two to their rapidly deteriorating emotional decline as the renovation becomes mired in disagreement and falling morale. As Nick Roux’s brooding, inventive sound design rumbles beneath us, the dancers lying on the floor entwine as angry lovers and unquiet sleepers, and their child joins them in the roiling agitation. It is a powerful, disconcerting and recognizable image and memorably highlights what the production has to say about how easily we can get lost in the details and the clichés of domestic nirvana. But its impact is not sustained and developed. Director Ross Ganf and his collaborators need to craft a greater fluency in their narrative – or at least find how to move more emphatically from their satiric intentions to the stronger emotional kick.

Some of the segments could be dispensed with (including, perhaps, the final one) and the excellent dance elements highlighted more. The audience logistics also need simplifying – we will be moved more, if we are moved about less. This is a work of originality and promise, an intriguing series of entertaining set pieces. But, in its present form, Malmo falls gallantly short of its own grand design.

Murray Bramwell

“Renovators’ delight doesn’t quite bring down the house” The Australian, March 1, 2012, p.15.