Dance / Impulse, Australian Dance Party. At Woden Town Square, March 14. Reviewed by MICHELLE POTTER.

Australian Dance Party, Canberra’s professional dance company, is never one to perform in what we might call a conventional performance space.

I don’t recall, for example, ever seeing the company dance in a proscenium-style theatre.

The company’s most recent presentation, Impulse, sits centre-stage in that performance model. It is a free show incorporating the creation and improvisation of music, dance and visual arts, with its opening show taking place outdoors in the Woden Town Square.

The dancers performed on what looked like a Tarkett flooring of grass (synthetic, I assume) and were surrounded by a mixed audience of dance fans and photographers and artists recording the performance in their own unique manner. Two musicians sat on a raised platform at the side of the performing space working with a variety of electronic resources to produce a soundscape.

The show began with a single dancer creating a fluid but grounded series of movements. Slowly five others joined her at various times, sometimes dancing separately, sometimes as a group. At times they seemed to be copying each other’s steps, working in unison or cascading out from each other. Sometimes one dancer would take a rest. Sometimes two or three dancers would separate themselves from the others and create a quite different set of movements.

There were times too when the dancers performed using stretches of tape to join bodies or to stretch bodies into varied shapes. Costumes were a mix of styles but there was a certain unity with three main colours being represented  ̶  orange, pink and black.

All performers, both dancers and musicians, were a pleasure to watch, especially as the show progressed and as a certain nervousness dissolved at what was the first performance of an unusual work. But for me it was Jahna Lugnan who really stood out. Her freedom of movement and absolute involvement in performing was exceptional.

The soundscape was dramatic and had a definite contemporary feel. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of sound production happened when two dancers joined one of the musicians and used a microphone attached in some manner to the musician’s equipment. Each took a turn in speaking into the microphone. It was not clear what they actually said, but somehow whatever they muttered or whispered was translated into a loud non-human sound.

Impulse, which celebrates Australian Dance Party’s 10th year of existence, was quite fascinating in many ways. It lasted for almost an hour, but the time just sped along.

A final show will take place on March 21 at the Gungahlin Town Square as part of the Gungahlin Festival. A pop-up exhibition is also being arranged in the future to feature the work created by the photographers and visual artists, which emerged as their reaction to Impulse.