CriticalDance Forum

Brand new or just brand, asked the message board as we left DV8's Living Costs at Tate Modern. Well, not brand new: it is a partial though substantial reworking of Cost of Living (2000). Just brand? A much more pertinent question, and a central theme of Lloyd Newson's piece, which takes the audience on a tour through the Tate, with scenes from low-art clowning to high-art ballet, by way of vaudeville, pop, circus and fashion.

THIS is a mess. But that’s exactly what it is meant to be. Living Costs is a helter-skelter promenade performance that turns the galleries of Tate Modern into a boutique where a variety of values are on display.
DV8’s evening begins with the appearance of our hostess (Wendy Houstoun). She’s in matronly black with a strand of inept fake pearls. After making certain that all our headsets are working, she brusquely herds us off around the building. The process is a little like trying to navigate Heathrow with a package-holiday crowd that won’t get out of your way.

In DV8's promenade performance at Tate Modern, the former power station is the star. Whatever message Newson intends to put across is dwarfed by the volume of space in which we watch the dancers and each other; 250 spectators are herded from the Turbine Hall up to the top floor by bossy Wendy Houstoun and vigilant gallery staff. No straying allowed, although DV8, as its name suggests, prides itself on nonconformity.

Just for Show
by JUDITH MACKRELL for the Guardian

When they're not dancing, his cast of nine desperate wannabes are acting out other aspirational scenarios.

published: May 28, 2005

Founded in 1986 by Australian-born Lloyd Newson - who studied psychology in Melbourne before joining New Zealand Ballet - DV8 Physical Theatre's unnerving and often raw work blends movement with text - sometimes provocative and unafraid to dive headlong into touchy topics like racism and religious intolerance.

In "To Be Straight With You," which opens at Yerba Buena's Novellus Theater tonight, the company dives headlong into the issue of homophobia and violence against gay people in a confrontational work, both visceral and brainy.

Q: What inspired this piece?

A: In the early '90s, my partner and I went to a gay pride march just outside Brixton, which was largely an African Caribbean community. We were walking to this park, and I was holding my partner's hand and we got an incredible amount of abuse.

He, being nonwhite, was deeply shocked, maybe even more than I was. And the question we spoke about later was why is it that a minority who has experienced oppression and hatred, why would they give it out so readily to another minority?