DANCE
Hold Me Closer Tony Danza ★★★★
Monash Performing Arts Centre, until May 3
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Contemporary dance in Melbourne was a lot more exciting when Gold Coast-based company The Farm premiered a 20-minute version of this rousing comic rhapsody at the Keir Choreographic Award in 2020.
Hold Me Closer Tony Danza is a free-form medley of images and symbols of division and unity.Credit: Jade Ellis
Since then, presenters have cancelled not one, but two large-scale dance festivals. The long-running Dance Massive was put on the shelf in 2020 and the flash-in-the-pan Frame Biennial disappeared in 2023 after only one outing.
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Now the Keir Choreographic Award, which was one of the richest performing arts prizes in the country, is also kaput. Its demise, as is so often the way in Australia, has caused barely a ripple in the arts sector.
It is, in short, a time of uneasiness in the world of contemporary dance. Morale is low. Activity is low. No wonder this beautifully produced show seems like a warm ray of Queensland exuberance in the vacant autumnal gloom.
Hold Me Closer Tony Danza is a free-form medley of images and symbols of division and unity. It’s also loaded with a grab bag of theatre gags, including fake endings, improvised role playing, audience dress-ups and a daggy dance battle.
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Hold Me Closer Tony Danza has an irresistible prankster vivacity.Credit: Jade Ellis
The audience participation – of which there is plenty – culminates with the two dancers, Kate Harman and Michael Smith, bouncing around like auteur Easter bunnies, trying to wrap more-or-less compliant audience members in gold foil.
Perhaps this sounds too much like artists playing games with themselves, but there are also extended sections of finely crafted abstract dance, including a lengthy conclusion in which opposing movement styles are gradually brought together.
