Grief, white supremacy and rival AIs: The Robot Dog tackles the big questions

Brockman’s lighting design bathes the stage in warm etherealness when the spectre of Wing Lam appears and stark white lighting when the AI are talking to one another. Nathan Burmeister’s set lovingly conjures a Chinese altar – site of Janelle’s eventual reconnection with her heritage – and the loss of a person, symbolised by ubiquitous $2 checked bags containing all of Wing Lam’s possessions.

The Robot Dog is most poignant when it’s mining humour and meaning from its material, whether it’s in the exploitation Harry faces at work as he becomes the poster boy for his company’s futile efforts at reconciliation (via tokenistic gestures like “Aboriginal flag muffins”), or in the different ways in which Cantonese and Luritja cultures intersect and sit apart from one another.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

PERFORMANCE ART | ASIA TOPA
Fire Drill Scenario ★★★
Arts House, North Melbourne, until March 9

Yes, this show really is a fire drill. The whole experience takes about an hour – if you include
all the preliminaries – but, make no mistake, you will be participating in an actual drill.

There’s no twist. No surprising metatheatrical hijinks. No unexpected transformation. We get
exactly what the show publicity promises: a run-through of the venue’s evacuation
procedure.

South Korean choreographer and artist Geumhyung Jeong is our compliance officer. She
presents us with the floorplan, identifies the exits and demonstrates the paths of egress.
It goes on and on – and then we get the drill.

So, what’s really happening? Why book tickets for a fire drill? Surely it’s satire? Well, yes,
but the humour is so dry it might have passed through a molecular sieve.

The point, of course, is to encourage the audience to reflect on the idea of safety and
whether the arts are just a small department in the larger cultural edifice of risk avoidance.
But it’s very deadpan. The only moment of real parody is during a demonstration of fire
safety products, which includes a special fireproof basket for lowering pets from burning
buildings.

Otherwise, Jeong remains machinelike and emotionally neutral throughout. She withholds
her personality while still projecting a kind of weird automaton charisma.

To underline her detachment, she has placed a number of homemade robots on display in
the centre of the room, which seem to enjoy the performance almost as much as the
audience.

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Is there any skerrick of excitement? Not really, although occasionally you might notice the way Jeong moves around the room or glimpse the outline of her body beneath the baggy costume.

And there’s something about that body – which is the toned body of a dancer – that wants to
get out. It wants us to get out, too – and to hell with the designated path of egress.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

PERFORMANCE ART
ButohBar: OUT of ORDER II ★★★★
Abbotsford Convent, until March 9

You arrive at ButohBar: OUT of ORDER II to find a concrete forecourt transformed by dreamlike performance art. Walls sidle up to you and glare with disapproval. Masked figures with pendulous sex organs writhe and become entwined. Piles of rubbish skitter in the wind, as wimpled, seemingly heavily pregnant women waft up and down stairs – an echo, perhaps, of the dark history of the Abbotsford Convent as a workhouse for destitute mothers-to-be.

By the time you’ve ordered sake from the bar, Butoh master Atsushi Takenouchi has entered with a drum and begun to sing to a demonic effigy. The ritual summons us inside a space which will transgress and upend all norms of performance.

You won’t get too comfortable at this nightclub at the end of the universe. Seating is arranged higgledy-piggledy, performance erupts from all corners, and emcee Yumi Umiumare will even play a whimsical game of musical chairs to keep you on your toes.

Umiumare has worked in Melbourne for decades, and this collaboration with Japanese and local talent – a follow-up to a sold-out first instalment in 2023 – is an anarchic fusion of cabaret, monologue, burlesque, puppetry, choreography and surreal and subversive performance art.

Warped visions emerge from the darkness. A wild black avian creature appears with a fibre-optic tongue. A puppet-mother gives birth to a child she dotes upon, dances with and devours, before the kid gives up and re-enters the womb. Female fighters beat each other to death with enormous breasts, as the audience eggs them on. Maude Davey delivers a monologue on art and time. A disgruntled burlesque artist has a striptease sabotaged by Umiumare, who wantonly throws cabbage onstage and eats a raw egg.

The grotesque beauty of butoh emerges in a pas de deux between Umiumare and Takenouchi. Their dance theatre is a marriage of death and life, the movement language convulsive and built from an involuntary, trancelike vocabulary attuned to bodily taboo. It feels almost risen from the grave – constructed as it is from spasm and throe and grimace, from bulging eye and lolling tongue.

If these figures are already dead, the comical arrival of a “Doctor Butoh” is much too late, and when she gives us the “Chat GPT” lowdown on the history and ambit of butoh as an avant-garde form, it’s really a sly kick at the human impulse to categorise. Butoh has always been a slippery style of experimental performance that resists definition, and it seduces even the good Doctor into its irrational embrace.

As the glitchy, dark synth dominated soundtrack from Hiroko Komiya swells to a climax, death rises to claim its due. Umiumare leads the audience in some primal screaming, and we’re released into the night reordered, and revivified, by the ecstatic encounter.