“Pictures and Ghosts,” which sprung from Frahn-Starkie’s residency at Platform Arts, and the “introspective time” the train journey to and from the studio afforded, looks at the changeable nature of what remains of a performance, for both the performer and those in the audience, when the house lights come on.[3] We can document dance through notation, analogue and digital records, but how accurate and reliable is this picture in looking at what was? Frahn-Starkie erases and redraws, printed text is included and layered, and the name Ginger Rogers appears without (to my eyes) Fred Astaire. Melding “film and photography as a way to fuel her nostalgic tendencies and to frame and capture moments in time,” the ‘remains’ of a performance, those material traces, are as slippery as the transparencies Frahn-Starkie slides over the flatbed, and throws, in clipped cornered retro-glory, up on the wall.[4] Just as each introspective staging draws up what was and laces it with new memories of what is, sewing further memories into the seabed, Frahn-Starkie plays with perspective. Through placement on the flatbed, and smaller images, a projected version of Frahn-Starkie performing alongside multiples of herself recedes in the picture plane, as if in “contemplation on the possibilities and pitfalls of archiving dance.”[5] Later, as Frahn-Starkie draws a loose outline in a green marker around her projected image, upon removing her body, the shape that remains is both nothing and everything like the body it once held. A curved bean and an energy forcefield. When this green outline is digitally animated and pulses and zings with every knee bend and arm crook, the ghosts of the past are fully activated. 

“Cosmos,” in three level of consciousness parts—Waking, Dream, and Higher, transitions—in the blink of an eye, from “existential emotions, recurring dreams and nightmares, and the connectivity between energy and soul.”[6] Mooney’s choreography takes this hand-drawn energy field and colours every limb and leaf in rapidly evolving, twitching, falling, full and saturated colour. Mooney, joined by Hugo Poulet, Erin O’Rourke, Hoyori Maruo, and Angelica Menta, alternate between angular anguish and fluid tenderness, in both solos and as a super-charged quintet in hypnotic unison, combing over every uneven, unknown surface the afterlife presents. With sound by Dave Thomson (Lost Few) and cellist Conrad Hamill, as Mooney, Poulet, O’Rourke, Maruo, and Menta lie supine at the foot of the stage, the act of returning to the soil is called forth. As a current of sound appears to ripple through them by turn, the shadows their limbs cast are thrown up, far larger than their human forms could ever dream, against the night sky and the cosmos that lies beyond, sloughing off earlier vocalised doubts and anxieties.