“This Is What’s Happening is full of this kind of hushed, understated theatricality. It constantly shapes toward narrative, but never settles into a storytelling. It slips laterally through its many diverse parts – episodes, sketches, extended passages. What is consistent is the atmosphere of unease, albeit unease with a slyly comic inflection.

…

Auden said that poetry is a way of happening. He said it is a mouth, and that-

it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper

Dance, too, is a way of happening. Like poetry, it survives in the place of its making, hidden from executives and supervisors and the rest. It survives in the places where we’re all sitting together, like this, legs to one side, despite wistfulness and exhaustion and work the next morning. It survives in the body, carried forth, into a new light.”

- Andrew Fuhrmann

Alice Will Caroline’s first collaborative work, This is What’s Happening is an experiment in dance and theatre. It referenced workplace absurdity and structural cruelty within a formal embodied choreographic exploration of dance under stricture, while folding in references to caravans, slugs and religion. Described by Gerard Van Dyck on Triple R SmartArts as “About nothing and everything at once - like the Seinfeld of dance”, it did not foreground theme or concept as a driving force, but rather, embraced multiplicity and complexity as a formal framework.

People

Choreography and Performance: Alice Will Caroline

Sound Design: Emah Fox

Lighting Design: Jason Crick

Costume Design: Alice Will Caroline with Margaret O’Donohue

Presented by Darebin Arts Speakeasy and Northcote Town Hall for Melbourne Fringe

Awards: Nominated for an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance and a Green Room Award for Sound Design, Winner of the Melbourne Fringe Best Dance Award.

Supported by Darebin Arts Speakeasy and Dancehouse

Images by Greta Costello

Review by Andrew Fuhrmann: https://neandellus.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/slown-smallened-son-this-is-whats-happening/

Review by Gracia Haby, Fjord Review: https://fjordreview.com/blogs/all/beloved-be?_pos=1&_sid=d654c5a34&_ss=r