quiver
1997

Quiver, which toured in 1998 with Made to Move, is another stunning example of the collaboration Leigh Warren can generate between live musicians and dancers. Quiver is in two parts, Shimmer and Swerve.

Shimmer features the Australian String Quartet playing Adelaide composer Graeme Koehne's String Quartet Number 2 Shaker Dances, and is a meditation on spiritual ecstasy inspired by the American Shaker religion. The musicians and dancers wear long flowing coats in sombre colours.

The musicians sit on simple wooden chairs at the front of the stage and as they play the company dances the spiritual longing of the Shakers and the physical restraint they placed upon themselves in the search for union with God. The musicians slowly join the dancers as the light fades. Hauntingly beautiful, spiritually uplifting and charged with a subtle and restrained eroticism, Shimmer was a worthy winner of the inaugural Adelaide Critics Circle Award.

Swerve is a about as far from the purity and simplicity of Shimmer as it is possible to be. Featuring the Sydney based junk percussion group Pablo Percusso beating out the rhythms of the modern industrial world on a huge range of instruments including the humble mobile rubbish bin. Swerve opens with the dancers striding across the stage, wearing old hubcaps for shoes. As the work progresses, the musicians become dancers while the dancers steal their instruments to beat out their own frenzied rhythms.

Lit by stabbing and swirling intelligent lighting, Swerve builds to a crescendo of industrial chaos, savage humour and angular, disjointed dance, leaving the audience almost as breathless as the dancers and musicians on stage.