what would you do if your frozen heart began to melt? & Constructed Realities
Dyson Industries
eyeline, 2003

Late last year, I saw two dance works choreographed by Clare Dyson, a Canberrra-based artist. The works were developmental pieces presented at the Brisbane Powerhouse as part of a research residency. I admit I am new to dance and am struggling a little in writing about it. I have always wanted to write about dance but never quite made the leap. What makes Dyson's works more available or readable to me, as a predominantly new media and visual art writer, is her engagement with installation and gallery spaces. The performers' bodies, then, are immersed in audio-visual spaces; there is a less of a staged quality and both the performers and audience members are somehow transported along the lines of the trajective and the performative.

The first performance, what would you do if your frozen heat began to melt?, was presented in the Powerhouse's Gallery as a work-in-progress. For most, this gallery has proven to be a difficult space. As the name suggests, the Powerhouse is a renovated powerhouse and the integrity of the industrial space has been retained in its renovation to a cultural centre. The gallery is not a whitebox: it's brick and various elements of its industrial past punctuate walls and floors. It is also sectioned into three by partly decayed walls. I can't actually recall what part of the old powerhouse this space used to be, but it is located on the ground level of the riverside of the building and a wall of glass overlooks the usually still, brownish river. The gallery does seem to have an observatory quality where visitors can look in, out and through - not quite panoramic but nevertheless one of the many enjoyable vistas in this city.

I have to tell you about the gallery in order to tell you about the installation in which the performance is presented. Viewers are instructed to come and go during the one hour performance. Outside, along the river's edge, white serving platters are placed on white tables. Each platter contains hearts cast in ice, coloured red with rose petals set in them. It had been raining that evening - a summer rain, heavily scented by the ripening of tropical flowers, fruit and the earth itself. It's the sort of rain which releases the heat from the ground and freshens the air. Along the outer glass wall, a row of 'tea light' candles are glowing in brown paper bags, weighted by a handful of small stones. Inside the gallery, in the three cells, large blocks are ice are melting into surrounding, erratic puddles, a palm-sized red heart is frozen into each. The performance-installation takes place across the three spaces of the gallery and as each space is animated in turn, the audience moves to get a better view.

Watching ice melt has never been my idea of riveting viewing. However, as with anything as subtle and slow as this, there is clearly an appreciation of time passing, of the transformation of something solid into water and the possibility of it evaporating into air. And it's this engagement with the time it takes that I find enticing, even poignant. Obviously, as the ice melts, the puddle in which it sits grows. The performers, dressed in long black skirts made from interfacing, a sewing material for stiffening collars, cuffs, waistbands and the like. It's one of those sewing terms that also found meaning in the lexicon of new media practice. Interfacing, while stiff because it is a bonded textile like felt, is actually quite light. The skirts skim across the puddles, not only drawing the water into them but also drawing with the water. The performance is comprised of sequences and repetitions of slight gestures: rocking which causes ripples; swaying which splashes the water; and lifting the skirts so that the water drips back to the ground. It's a little like a Cy Twombly drawing. There is an atmospheric dreaminess in this work. It's like a daydream where the mind wanders and the body does what it can to parallel the randomness of thoughts.

It's reminiscent of the Calvino story t zero which in turn reminds me of Zeno's Paradoxes. And herein lies a moment of my own heart melting. I was perusing my bookshelves for the anthology in which t zero is bound. First pulling out Cosmicomics, I open it to read the inscription on the title page: it's from someone I once loved, long gone. The heart does indeed melt - with mercurial speed - at this memory, so surprisingly embodied that it invokes an overwhelmingly strange response. Almost decomposition. Recomposed and returning the book, I find Time and The Hunter, the rightful location of t zero. Here Calvino describes the possibilities dormant during the second in which an arrow is shot, in transit between the archer and the target. This second is an eternity, a universe of which Calvino writes: "supposing time knows no repetitions and consists of an irreversible series of seconds each different from the other, and each second happens once and for all, and living in it for its exact length of one second means living in it forever."1 In Dyson's choreography, time is stretched, slowed down, where the rhythm of a heart (or ice) melting makes for muted musicality composed of small gestures. A second is an hour, a lifetime an impossibility. So too, possibilities are endless in Dyson's choreographed fragments.

In Constructed Realities, the second work in development through Dyson's residency which will be performed in its entirety at the Canberra Theatre Centre, the audience is again drawn to the Powerhouse's gallery. We congregate outside, looking into the three spaces through the windows. Reading the gallery from left to right, as a series of installations, a garden grows in the first cell; in the second, there's a stack of suitcases; and a patch of grass sits in the centre of the third. Dirt has been spread across the floor and about 20 flowers with absurdly long stems are planted in it. They evoke Bataille's writing about the irrationality of flowers, straining to reach the sun only to collapse back the ground - dead, dying, rotting back into the earth. Gathered outside the gallery, peering into it through the glass, a woman sweeps the floor, tidying the scattered dirt with a broom to form a straight edge for her garden. She is inappropriately dressed for such a task - wearing a formal, long, satin, gold gown, high heels and white gloves. As the doors are thrown open, the audience is ushered inside.

This work engages ideas about and practices of the landscape, from the suburban to the arid. In addressing the Australian landscape, Dyson also considers experiences of belonging and home: what is means to be Australian; what home or place feels like; and what it means to exist within and across multiple cultures in this place. And she does this through an itinerary of performed vignettes dotted throughout the Powerhouse comprised of installation, projection and video. The audience is lead on a mystery tour of discreet spaces. Some of the scenes are familiar: a patch of manicured grass, packing and unpacking suitcases and a 'lady of the house' taking tea. Others - like the two performers velcroed together struggling against and with each other to free themselves of their clothing or the gown-clad gardener lovingly snipping the heads of her cherished flowers and crushing them into the dirt - are incongruous.

Dyson also takes us across more distant horizons and projected images of desert scenes form the backdrop to several of the performances. The desert occupies an indescribable place in the Australian psyche: terrifying because of it harshness yet also a romanticised drawcard for countless holidaymakers and tourists. It is, of course, home for many; sacred and dreaming for others. This beautiful environment has also become the site of ecological and human catastrophe: from nuclear testing to military base to prison for refugees. Constructed Realities is an exercise in geography, writing the landscape in a way that draws on the visual and literary poesis of this country's imaginary about the land. It seems to pose many questions about what shapes our sense of belonging and place. It asks, at whose expense do we feel at home?

1 Italo Calvino, 't zero', in Time of the Hunter. trans. Giulio Einaudi. London : Sphere Books. 1987. 110