A Journey of Healing
Across North Africa, the all-night music-dance-trance ritual called lila (pronounced lee-lah) is celebrated as a means for spiritual healing.
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Things open where they began, in a loop, only I don’t know it yet. In measured steps, Angela Goh walks diagonally across the stage. She studies the audience, her focus fixed, unblinking. Upon an exposed, brightly lit stage, it could be said she is comparatively exposed, but her unflinching focus says otherwise. In the quiet of the Sylvia Staehli Theatre, at Dancehouse, for the opening night performance of “Sky Blue Mythic,” you can hear the noise of the traffic outside. In a work that “is about our relationship to what surrounds us,”[note]Angela Goh, “Sky Blue Mythic” Artist Statement, Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Sky-Blue-Mythic-Artist-Statement.pdf, accessed March 12, 2022.[/note] the stream of traffic on a Friday night adds to the feeling that Goh has walked into the theatre almost by chance. Cap on, and a tall orange can of Papaya drink in hand, did Goh take a wrong turn and find herself in a symbolic labyrinth on a walk back from the shops?[note]In reference to Goh’s Artist Statement, “I could write about many things, not limited to: the Romantic Ballet “Giselle”, Tarkovskyian cinema, the Japanese anime Sword Art Online, the brilliance of Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, the perfection of Malevich’s Red Square.”[/note]
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Angela Goh in “Sky Blue Mythic.” Photograph by Prudence Upton
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Across North Africa, the all-night music-dance-trance ritual called lila (pronounced lee-lah) is celebrated as a means for spiritual healing.
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