Futurism in the Pumpkin Patch

The boulevard of London plane trees has been wrapped in Yayoi Kusama’s white-on-pink dots, the only southern hemisphere biodiversity capable of flourishing in these particular northern hemisphere trees. Together with Julien Opie’s Australian Birds animated on 20 screens planted in the earth beneath, this futuristic and adorned natural world sets the tone for Melanie Lane’s “Pulau (Island),” commissioned especially for Asia TOPA and the National Gallery of Victoria’s Kusama exhibition.

Performance

Melanie Lane: “Pulau (Island)” / Lucy Guerin Inc: “I'm in a Forest”

Place

Great Hall, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, February 23, 2025

Words

Gracia Haby

Melanie Lane's “Pulau (Island).” Photograph by Gregory Lorenzutti

Guided into the gallery by Kusama’s Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees, threading past her replanting of Narcissus Garden (first presented in 1966 on the lawn in front of the Italian pavilion of the Venice biennale), it seems only fitting that for this after-hours viewing of Lane’s new, site-specific work that the audience should assemble around a Dancing Pumpkin. In the NGV International’s Federation Court, Kusama’s bronze pumpkin, some five-metres tall, looms large, or have I been made smaller as I passed through the Narcissus Garden of stainless steel spheres? Transformation and infinite possibilities being the name of the game, I feel the intended but one small part of the cosmos, as I find a place to wait, see, and sow.

The voluminous pumpkin hovers off the ground, eight tentacle-like limbs dancing in the air, summoning the dancers, Katherine Hegeman, Jareen Wee, Te Bajao, and Tyrel Dulvarie who descended from the nearby escalator. Wrapped tight in costumes by Eugyeene Teh, their eyes concealed by mirrored sunglasses that wrap around their faces, they strike a confident, loud entry. Each with luggage for their perpetual journey strapped to their backs, these after-hours striders command the space. Ready for anything, from their backpacks they pull pink-skinned bananas. Beneath the pumpkin, they assemble for their journey, part of Lane’s “fantasy and reality.” Lane is drawn to the contradictions in Kusama’s work, to the “tension between joy and pain.”[1] Like the plane trees capable of supporting the life of artificial birds only, play tips into sorrow and back again, in the underlying fragility of it all.

Melanie Lane's “Pulau (Island).” Photograph by Gregory Lorenzutti

Sustenance-fuelled, Hegeman, Wee, Bajao and Dulvarie (who performed with Bangarra Dance Theatre from 2016 until 2021) flit to the nearby Great Hall, the audience trailing behind them. Beneath Kusama’s Dots Obsession floating, inflated, overhead, I find a space on the carpet to sit. With the audience ushered into position along the two longer sides of the hall, the stage is set for the weightless world of vinyl balloons above to be tethered by the grounded world of the dancers below. For an island, too, is a place of contradictions to Lane, being simultaneously “a paradise, a trap, a solitary place, hazardous and abundant.” Here, where repetition of movement and obsession of dot collide, a hallucinatory stage is called into being. A journey evoked by our own island hopping in the gallery sparking a deeper kind of transformation. But for this, layers, literally, need to be shed, and so, off come thigh-high boots and protective garments. So, too, glasses, to reveal cloud-like white contacts in their eyes and vulnerability.

Held within pools of light, Hegeman, Wee, Bajao and Dulvarie each swing lengths of red rope overhead in a circular motion. Harnessing the power of momentum, they propel faster and faster, transforming themselves to an unknown destination. Later working against natural momentum, they make their lengths of rope squiggle in the air like serpents. The energy required, to make a rope lash and jerk in the air overhead, apparent, such world-building is multilayered. Having earlier tested and tasted “the fruits of each land until we arrive at a final destination, transported and transformed . . . to travel into Kusama’s universe and see where it takes us . . . [in the hope of better understanding and reflecting] on ourselves and the world we currently inhabit” is a gift. As the dancers pull themselves into ruffled black and white costumes that recall bird ruffs, they tip their heads skyward and trill and coo, before planting themselves in the black, fake-fur soil in the centre of the hall. Into three pockets cut into a bed of fur, they disappear, calling to mind the power of plant roots, working together to stabilise and grow. And so “gently blooms” the work to completion, and I am left to ponder the immensity of the universe from the vantage point of one small pumpkin seed.

Lucy Guerin Inc's “I'm in a Forest.” Photograph by Gregory Lorenzutti

From islands reached through repeated mantra to the forest floor by way of film, in Lucy Guerin Inc’s “I’m in a Forest,” seems, too, a natural geographical leap. Shifting states, and shifting venues, “I’m in a Forest,” Lucy Guerin Inc’s first foray into film as an artwork (as opposed to documentation and promotional material) features 21 dancers as my guide, writ large on the screen at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), another venue, and medium, not necessarily associated with performing arts.

“I’m in a Forrest” first screened as part of Biennale Danza in Venice, 2023, as part of their dance-on-film programme. Directed by Lucy Guerin and Angus Kemp, the short film, as if on the heels of the dancers as they navigate the empty gallery space, and filmed at the conclusion of Lucy Guerin’s “Newretro” run, allows me to journey where otherwise I could not. With the camera oscillating between feeling like it is my own eyes and steering its own course as it plunges me into a knot of dancers, revealing angles typically not privy to an audience member, it in turn reveals a new way of entering and reading the work as it becomes its own entity. It summons the forest floor of the title, from the concrete floor of the gallery. The title of which plucked from dancer Michelle Heaven’s revelation that one of the things she conjured a sense of, whilst performing, was a forest. Compressing 21 works created throughout 21 years into a 17-minute director’s cut, the camera travels around the dancers, with a choreographic eye. Without the audience, and in such proximity, a new, reactive intimacy reveals itself. Laced over the dance, four dancers, Heaven included, speak about what they think about while on stage. This layering of internal, personal thoughts adds to the biodiversity, the strength of the soil, the cinematic forest floor, establishing this as not a re-performance, but the transmission of ideas.

Lane’s “Pulau (Island)” and Guerin and Kemp’s “I’m in a Forrest” make the most of or respond to the specificity of their sites, yielding to time bending, destabilising journeying. Allowing a multiplicity of meanings to emerge, in celebration, rich like the earth beneath my feet. One a choreographic response to art, the other a choreographic response to dance, and both making of me, an earth-bound pollinator.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

Melanie Lane in a printed interview about “Pulau (Island)” distributed upon arrival at the NGV, and from which all subsequent quotes are pulled from. “Pulau (Island),” 2025, is commissioned in response to Yayoi Kusama’s work Dots Obsession, 1996/2024–, which operates as both a backdrop and influential reference for the work.

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