(from Annie’s pen.) What a great night we had. It started in Mundaring where the bus was waiting for us. We made a quick stop at a new pickup point in Glen Forrest where Rosemary and Deirdre climbed aboard and off we went to the Quarry Amphitheatre. There was a buzz of anticipation in the air when we arrived, the evening perfect and balmy. As we tucked into our respective picnics, we were able to watch the dancers perform their warmup routines. Such precious memories of bygone days when we could move our bodies with the flexibility (almost!) of those youthful and athletic young dancers. The evening’s performance by dancers of the West Australian Ballet, with WA’s flagship contemporary dance company, Co3 Australia, was named ‘InSynch’. There was not a tutu in sight, and it was obvious from the opening scene that this was not your run-ofthe-mill Swan Lake. The first of four presentations – X-it – involved the combination of stage and screen and it was really tricky to discern whether the dancers were on the screen (previously filmed) or on the stage as they ‘moved’ from one to the other. The backdrop on the screen was Fremantle Prison where the dancers were filmed months before. The timing involved for them to create the impression of moving from screen to stage to screen was impeccable and, even if we had no idea what was going on, it was incredibly impressive! The second presentation, ‘The Sofa’, was a welcome light relief from the preceding piece. There was lots of laugh-out-loud moments as the dancers skilfully depicted the age-old ‘dance’ we’ve all negotiated – that of the gentle (or not so gentle) art of seduction on a cosy sofa. The third set involved the audience choosing (via their mobile phones) one of four pieces of music, to which the dancers improvised their dance - with a few metal benches set about the stage, the dancers moved and danced about the stage, alone, in pairs, forming into random groups. Hard to imagine they hadn’t rehearsed it all first but, according to the blurb, they made it up as they went along and had no idea which music would be played until minutes before the performance. The final piece was Reincarnation. It was pretty confusing. Dancers were ‘dying’ in the presence of the devil (a brilliant dancer, Polly Hilton), only to be resurrected later. It was somewhat long but still entertaining and offered the spectacle that we have come to expect from the opening of the Season at the fantastic Quarry Amphitheatre.
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