Chunky Move: 4/4 review – smooth moves and sudden stops to an off-kilter metronome

It looks a bit like Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation put through a contemporary dance filter, which is a pretty good start. Eight dancers in black streetwear execute popping-influenced steps like a cool tribe of automatons. Their limbs make smooth moves and sudden stops to the irregular rhythms of an off-kilter metronome.

The artistic director of Melbourne-based Chunky Move, Antony Hamilton, has designed a kind of algorithm to create the counts of the choreography for 4/4. It’s a long, complex chain of numbers with their own inner logic, that dictates how many times each movement’s repeated. Each dancer’s brain must be firing like mad. You think of the infamous premiere of Stravinsky’s mega-complex The Rite of Spring, with Marie Rambert shouting out the counts from the wings, but where that performance sounds like it was chaos, this is perfectly ordered and contained.

The dancers perform in pairs, exactly in time with each other – if it were a solo, you could slip-up on the timing and go unnoticed, not so when you’re half of a matching set. It’s a herculean feat of memory and control played out in a fairly low-key way, to hypnotic effect. Musically the kilter gets ever-more off, with occasional conflicting tempos, the beats sparse then clattering, like rain rapping on a window then easing off. It comes off like the more laid back Australian cousin of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s dances to the music of Steve Reich.

There are four portable platforms pushed around the stage to create different set-ups and levels. They join together to rotate in a circle around the stage while a fuzzy orb shines on the backdrop. A reference, maybe, to cycles of time, day and night, weeks and years; a nod to earthly rhythms.

Meanwhile the dancers draw from house dance, krump and locking with mesmeric momentum, but it turns out you can’t keep that up indefinitely. When the dance decelerates, with that comes an aimlessness. In the latter third of the hour-long performance, the dance’s drive, direction and invention ebbs away, and with it a sense of satisfaction. It makes you think that perhaps we shouldn’t leave everything to algorithms.