Fuse. Choreographed and danced by Jack Riley. Music by Alexander Hunter. Ralph Wilson Theatre, Gorman Arts Centre, Braddon, September 7-9 at 7pm with a 3pm matinee on September 9. eventbrite.com.au/e/fuse-tickets-37081196858.
The first production in the 2017 Ralph Indie season of new Australian performance works is Fuse. It's a collaboration exploring the relationship between movement and sound and as the title suggests it combines the two elements closely.
![Jack Riley and Alec Hunter collaborate for Fuse. Photo: Andrew Sikorski](http://web.archive.org./web/20171127120550im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/y/5/i/2/k/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gy6cv5.png/1504180165205.jpg)
Dance artist Jack Riley, 22, was offered a residency in the Ralph Wilson Theatre to create a new work. The young artist began dancing as a teenager with QL2 and studied at the Victorian College of the Arts and has produced work for the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2016, worked with Tas Dance and Opera Australia and is undertaking professional development with Chunky Move in 2017. To bring his ideas for the Ralph Indie residency to fruition he sought a musical collaborator. It was suggested he get in touch with composer and performer Alexander Hunter, whom he had not worked with before. Riley emailed Hunter and on meeting him found they were compatible, important given the close nature their collaboration would take.
"He's definitely a character in the work," Riley says.
"He's just as important as I am."
They worked together "very intuitively", Riley says, building the work up together.
In Fuse, Riley as the dancer performs a series of "tasks" in the space using objects found out the back - a plinth, lighting poles, plastic - set up in such a way as to give the look and feel of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting. It's also loosely based on the Greek myth of Heracles and other stories with Hunter's music both as a prerecorded soundscape and performed live by him on bass viola da gamba.
"Alec seems to be holding the power ... putting me through these tasks I have to go through," Riley says.
"My work often comments on society, and in Fuse it is reflecting a darker, perhaps more sinister representation. My character is being tested and put through multiple challenges which I must overcome. Alec is holding the power in the work and moves slowly, always watching and controlling what is happening in the space."
Hunter, 33, was born in the US state of Ohio and studied music at Northern Illinois University in Chicago before undertaking his PhD in Scotland and moving to Canberra in 2014 for a teaching job at the ANU School of Music. He lives here with his partner Ellen, a scientist.
He says the pre-recorded music was developed during rehearsal and is thus consistent during performance but the musical sections he performs live on the bass viola de gamba is sometimes imnprovised within a predetermined structure, using Riley's movements as a guide and interacting with the choreography, so the performance is unique each time.
Hunter says, "The work sits somewhere in the middle of the continuum between one extreme (the music supporting the dance) and the other (the music and dance being completely separate but simultaneous performances), and each section occupies a slightly different space on this continuum."
He says Fuse is a combination of the old and the new: contemporary dance movements telling a story redolent of ancient mythology and an old instrument, the bass viola de gamba with contemporary textures and composition.
While he saw imagery of Heracles, the Aeneid and Dante in the piece, he says it is sufficiently abstract that audience members can discover what they see in it as they experience it.
"They can draw out what's meaningful for them."