Takase and Nakamura stand facing one another, each wearing a mask which covers their entire faces. A distance apart, they are connected, literally, by the long white threads which gently run between them. Calling upon spider morphology, in which moored threads attach to different surfaces, the lines of the web hang in a soft curve.[2] Their movements convey their communication through telepathic means, with fingers stacked one atop the other in suggestion of an evolutionary twist. Attuned to one another and their surroundings, they rely on prompts beyond the visual. With each thread indicative of a separate line of meaning, how I read what unfurls is wide open. 

The film, projected directly onto the plywood panels of the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, in this context, reads like the contour lines of a map. Just as the film is a collaboration with many, a new component, the warm and ribboned surface of the hall, adds to the collage. While the timber linework transforms and skews the vantage point to echo the “strangely distorted and perverse” materiality of the film, I miss being able to read the subtle mid-tones in Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s cinematography. To increase the ambiguity of time and space, Jóhannsson had elected to shoot in 16mm film; perhaps the resulting darkening of the palette, when projected over honeyed timber, will amplify this sensation? As shapes loomed only to dissolve into the walls, as film and dance continued to meld, anything more concrete, it transpires, might have clipped the cosmic theme. What I lost as a film screening, I gained as a regenerated amalgam. In costumes designed by Mikio Sakabe and Ana Rajcevic, echoing the black and white palette and “revealing the underlying muscles,” dancers Takase, Kilonzo, and Nakamura became “these fantastic beings . . . covered with fur or mole velvet”. With their hands raised overhead, searching, they suggest “the upward-looking astronomical eye” that “when fully extended… reveals the heavens in as much detail as [our present-day] astronomical telescopes.”