Fringe Dance

Sunshine Boy
three stars

Atomic 3001
three stars

both shows at Dance Base

Mary Brennan 

In 1980, Leigh Bowery left his native Australia, moved to London - and found himself, as a creative wild card. More recently, Scottish dance-maker Andy Howitt moved to Sunshine, Melbourne - and found himself close to where Bowery was born and grew up. Howitt’s solo, Sunshine Boy, brings together those life-lines in vivid celebration of an iconoclast whose influence has outlived him - he died in 1994, aged thirty-three. 
It’s doubtful if Bowery was ever as svelte as Howitt is, when he manifests in the candy-pink unitard underneath the frou-frou costumes that the hefty Aussie cross-dressed in. But as Howitt skips blithely across the stage, he really catches the buoyant spirit, the arch mischief, that Bowery brought to the 80’s London club and fashion scene. And when  he references Bowery’s time with the Michael Clark company, Howitt has Clark’s signature moves - the edgy angularities, pelvic swivels, fleet footwork - to a tee. Facts and anecdotes mingle with the dance, the music - Velvet Underground, Bowie - and the outrageous frockery, to showcase the radical, but intrinsically private, artist who hid behind a series of garish masks.
Throbbing, insistent pulses cudgel the darkness in Atomic 3001, relentlessly drilling into the very muscles and nerve-ends of Leslie Mannès’s isolated figure. Frozen in a centre spot of light, she twitches, flickers, ratchets robotically as if wired into the soundscape - you wonder, however, if it is controlling her, or is she generating the beats and beeps herself? This notion gains ground when - discarding her ‘prisoner’s’ red blouson - Mannès breaks out, freely owns the entire space, turns rock chick with seriously groovin’ moves, asserts her own power with the same intensity she brought to the earlier endurance test. Bowery would have loved such unstinting defiance.