Edinburgh International Festival 8th-31st August 2008

‘intensities of light and sound make Mortal Engine something of a bodysnatcher. It physically invades the viewer.'

- The Australian

Lola the Festival Fanatic's review of Mortal Engine at Sydney Festival  

"Two fervent comments overheard in the bathroom after Chunky Move's Mortal Engine:

1.That was the best thing I've seen in my life, ever. I want to go and see it again NOW.'
2. I just went whoopwhoopommigodwow in my head.

And so they liked it. So did I, a lot. The first Chunky Move piece I saw was Bonehead ten years ago, I liked it so much I went back three times. Back then they blazed a fiercely experimental trail and they still do. Years on, that performance still forms a part of collages of memories, I suspect in a very different way this one might too.

For me this show emphasised the notion of the cause and effect of our behaviour and what manifests from the way we tread the earth - silent or screaming, sticky or silky, powdery or dense - life keeps evolving.

Mortal Engine felt like a multifaceted, highly sophisticated physics and philosophy lesson combined into one, played to a thrashing beat, pulsing lasers and ethereal lighting states. Dancers fling, strut and fold their fragile human bodies into voids, like steel traps in velvet gloves each time creating something quite unexpected. It is a wildly imaginative piece as shapes, sounds and beautiful collages of light and flesh manifest before you.

After the 55 minute show the audience went berserk. Feeling moved by the experience, I went to text a friend I knew would love it. As I was doing so he tapped me on the shoulder. He provided just the kind of punctuation you need after an effusive night and the assurance that sometimes, even if briefly, there is no better space than being next to someone who understands what you're banging on about. After all, we're only human."

- Lisa Torrance

EIF Critic Bridget Stevens 

As the audience reeled out of last night's European premiere of Mortal Engine by Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move, words like ‘amazing', ‘stunning', ‘extraordinary' hardly seemed to do the performance justice. For this had been fifty-five minutes of human bodies morphing as if by magic into light images, then into sound, and back again.

One body became two, two became one. A large moving blob of amoeba-like creatures swallowed up everything in its path. Laser displays diminished the dancers, then magnified them. Giant tangles of spiders' webs were created, and exploding snowflakes, and splintering abstract shapes. All in edgy black and white and to the accompaniment of digitally-created sound which ranged from crackling static to haunting melody. At one point, the stage was filled with dry ice, which seemed somehow old fashioned after all the digital wizardry.

When the smoke was penetrated by a beam of bright green light, which the dancers appeared to manipulate with their hands, the audience had a weird and slightly scary sensation of tumbling along inside a huge tunnel. As to the meaning of the piece, well, I suppose it was broadly about relationships. The six dancers were fabulous and, whilst we could perhaps have done with seeing more of them, the dancing was beautifully integrated with the visuals and the sounds.

- EIF Critic Bridget Stevens

 ‘if the technology was impressive, the flesh and blood dancers were outstanding'

- The Herald

‘Utterly captivating and, that most illusive of theatrical goals, utterly unique'

- The Scotsman

'terrifying, beautiful, unique and absolutely unforgettable'

- Metro

You know it's something different when the lighting alone can make you gasp. Mortal Engine, dedicated to the late Sir John Drummond, can certainly be described as just that - different.

Gideon Obarzanek, the awardwinning artistic director of the Australian company Chunky Move, transforms contemporary dance into something quite unlike any other show.

An hour-long show that combines extraordinary usage of body, sound and lighting, Mortal Engine is certainly not for the faint-hearted. Amid bodysensitive laser lights that respond to movement are the dancers, whose intensely physical routine is geometric yet erratic, almost appearing reflexive. In a continuously changing scene where the laser lights seem just as alive as the dancers themselves, Mortal Engine progresses through futuristic formations to moments of intense biology and sexual charge. Shape-shifting is the key theme, and it's easy to forget that the figures on stage are, in fact, human.

Sound plays a large part in delivering the eerie ambience.

Similar to white noise or tuning a radio at times, it generates huge amounts of tension in the audience, causing some to jump with fright at times.

However, the sense of the surreal is interrupted by surprisingly human sections that centre on love and relationships.

It is this that adds story to the performance; without it, it could be viewed simply as colours and shapes; with the more human scenes, the performance appears to be about connection and disconnection, revealed through touch.

Awe, fright and inexplicable fascination are all emotions that you experience while watching - and you don't even have to be interested in dance to enjoy it, you just have to be interested.

Kyna Bowers is a pupil at Boroughmuir High School.

- Herald Young Critic Kyna Bowers