Creator Antony Hamilton describes Blazeblue Oneline as an “abstract snapshot of everything he loves to see, hear and feel”.  Judging by the enthusiastic response of opening night, the audience also loved what they saw, heard and felt in this exuberant and ambitious mix of dance, visual art and street culture.  Hamilton, who has worked with artists such as Lucy Guerin and Chunky Move, has created a fast-paced, acid infused, visual stream-of-consciousness with an infectious sense of fun.

Hamilton’s work uses carefully selected elements to consistently surprising, inventive and engaging effect.  These are the elements of urban Melbourne – cardboard boxes, trash, spray cans, graffiti, and street culture.  The stark white floor and walls of the set are literally a blank canvas for Hamilton’s explosion of colourful graffiti and fluorescent costumes.  After a symphonic prelude that blares out like a siren announcing the arrival of something otherworldly, the lights come up on a sole figure in the urban uniform of an oversized tracksuit.  After tagging the walls with the concentration of a calligraphic artist, he transforms elusively into a whirling collection of paper and trash before our eyes. Later a dancer manipulates a disassembled cardboard box into performing a series of flowing manoeuvres and shapes.

At times, the constant flow of ideas can almost be too much.  One of the early sequences involves a heartbreaking duet danced by two large cardboard boxes.  Later we are confronted by a life-size reanimated toy robot constructed from cardboard.  Two dancers engage it by generating makeshift weapons from discarded aluminium foil.  This narrative thread of an abstract sci-fi battle is suggested throughout the work, using Japanese anime and ‘80s culture as reference points.  The piece moves at break-neck pace, its complexity snowballing with each new idea.  These ideas feed off and inform one another well, but are not quite successful in supporting the overall structure and ending.

Perhaps the most successful and satisfying aspect of Blazeblue Oneline is its blurring of the line between dance and visual art.  The set and lighting by Bluebottle continually demand we view the entire stage as one complete visual image.  The set itself resembles the stark white environment of an art exhibition.  Under strobe lighting, performance sequences such as the ‘dancing boxes’ resemble stop-motion animation of visual art installations.  The two art forms blend seamlessly, with the choreography always responding to (and often helping to create) its visual environment. The act of graffiti art is of particular interest to Hamilton.  Dances mimicking the way a graffiti artist moves when working work particularly well when set amongst the intricate images created earlier in the show.  The ingenuity of some of the set devices – a jacket that magically slides up a wall; graffiti that is revealed as if being written by an invisible artist – is sometimes so technically fascinating that it almost detracts from the images themselves.

Blazeblue Oneline is, above all else, a celebration.  It is chaotic and brash but always grounded by a sense of playfulness.  At times it moves too fast for its own good – visual art often requires time and consideration for a viewer to get the most out of it, and the style of this performance constantly shifts our attention.  Hamilton’s passion permeates throughout the work, and it is a performance that skilfully engages our own sense of wonder, asking us to review and reassess the everyday images around us.

BLAZEBLUE ONELINE

Dates: Wednesday 30 April – Sunday 4 May 2008

Times: Wed-Sat 7:30, Sun 6pm

Theatre, Address: Arts House, Meat Market

Prices: $25 / $18

Bookings: www.easytix.com.au/artshouse