Edinburgh Fringe 2011
Low Down
I Infinite is a truly immersive piece of dance performed by a solo dancer in a blank white box
Review
I infinite is an exquisite gem of a dance piece, combining elements of dance, theatre and installation. A totally immersive experience that you step into and leave yourself behind.
It’s performed in a blank white box with minimal furniture and one dancer. The audience have been given grey overgarments to wear. All the colours are monochromatic. The room is dim. There are no distractions. There is a single dancer (Maria Olga Palliani), lithe and dressed in white.
The dancer moves across the room with the audience all around her, roaming and changing perspective. There are times when the view is the one you’d normally see of a dance piece, from further away, watching a whole performance. At other times, the dancer is so near, you focus on the movements of individual muscles.
Minimalistic music plays. Light projections play on the wall: loops upon loops; tiny squares that fracture into a myriad tiny squares. The lone dancer plays with the projections, by turn robotic, then fluid, watching them, mirroring them, apart from and a part of them. The dancer in her humanity is part of the finite world, striving to grasp the infinite.
.And then, a haze is projected into the room and the focus shifts from the dancer to the audience. White poles of light pierce the air; paisley swirls sit in layers on the air like oil spill on a puddle. Entranced, members of the audience walk around, hands outstretched, touching, playing and attempting to catch hold of the strange chimera thrown up by the haze. For a brief moment, we are both dancer and audience as we try to grasp the air between our fingers and watch a roomful of grey strangers in the mist doing the same.
In a final sequence, projections of light are played out like a closing prism that the dancer dances between. The piercing beams of light are reminiscent of scenes from a science fiction film where characters are drawn into the light and beyond into another world.
Choreographer, Tom Dale, and digital artist, Barret Hodgson have truly captured something of the infinite in this show. There is that feeling of looking up at the cosmos and seeing star beyond star with the contradictory realisation of just how small and insignificant we are in the great scheme of things, and yet simultaneously how connected.
