★★★½☆ Anouk van Dijk offers something epic that sometimes gets lost in the intimate.

Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne
February 19, 2016

Anouk van Dijk is a choreographer who thinks big. The Dutch dance maker’s latest offering, Rule of Thirds, is the final installment in a triptych of visually and technically audacious works in her Embodiment series. Each is both a commentary and yet a departure from the last, inviting an audience to discover something fresh built upon a foundation of memory. This epic architecture is also capable of a surprising illusion; while Rule of Thirds only uses four dancers presented on a featureless stage, it somehow manages to conjure an expansive, abyssal universe, ripe with narrative subtext.

Through a shroud of haze, barely illuminated by some seemingly distant glow, a sweeping form cuts through the darkness: a serpentine coil unfurling and re-spooling in the half-light. These limbs seem divorced from any anatomical logic, twisting around the torso in a constant, inexplicable caress. Other dancers join this mesmeric display, peeling into closely synchronised duets or fractured, defiant trios. There is a pervasive atmosphere of aggression and dominance, either explicitly or in its passive, vulnerable antithesis.

Chunky...