Review – Double Goer – Foster Group

Review – Double Goer – Foster Group

Hannah Playhouse

Wellington

6 April 2024

Choreographer: Sarah Foster-Sproull
Collaborators/Performers: Rose Philpott & Tamsyn Russell
Music & Light: Andrew Foster

Reviewed by Brigitte Knight

Premiering internationally at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and domestically at the Nelson Arts Festival in 2023, Double Goer is simultaneously a return to Foster Group’s roots (rigorous contemporary exploration in an intimate performance setting) and a directional shift with evidence of an increasingly academic and research-driven approach to choreography. Beneath popular culture’s understanding of the doppelgänger - a biologically unrelated lookalike - lies intriguing, darker German folklore; all living creatures have an invisible, identical spirit double, the negative or opposite of the person, and distinct from the concept of ghosts (the disembodied soul). Brief programme notes describe Double Goer as “…traversing the tensions and ally-ships of the Doppelgänger phenomenon…in a work that chronicles the meeting, battle, and potential demise of two strikingly similar women…”.

Featuring lighting and sound by choreographer Sarah Foster-Sproull’s husband Andrew Foster, Double Goer uses neon tube lights to delineate space and move the 50-minute work through states of varying emotional intensity. Foster-Sproull engaged neon tubes as props and lighting in To the Forest, To the Island (premiered in 2021 with Unitec School of Performing and Screen Arts, and restaged in 2022 for New Zealand School of Dance’s Performance Season), and the return of this striking production feature is just as effective when appearing in Double Goer as set, with little interaction from the dancers. Foster’s accompanying soundscape samples and reverses vocals, industrial noises, and rhythms in an aptly abstract and gently uncanny electronic composition.

Photographs by Melissa Banks

Choreographed collaboratively with experienced and highly-skilled contemporary dancers Rose Philpott and Tamsyn Russell, Foster-Sproull wields unity, symbolism, stylised gesture, entanglement, coordinated asymmetry, and reserved repetition with accomplished mastery in her idiosyncratic yet evolving movement vocabulary. Thorough integration of the dancer’s long hair into both the choreography and the visual world of the work is a real strength of Double Goer, inseparable from the partial nudity (the dancers wear only high-waisted black underpants for much of the performance) in creating optical illusions, animalistic yet mechanised imagery, and deliberately mesmeric drifting in audience observation of the work. Delightfully equally-matched, Philpott and Russell embody Foster-Sproull’s signature raucous physicality which is knowingly juxtaposed with refined and deliberate detail, as Double Goer moves the doppelgängers through symbiosis, conflict, iconography, religiosity, and metaphor.

Double Goer is one of Foster Group’s smaller, quieter works, similar in some ways to Dance Plant Collective’s recent Rituals of Similarity (performed at the Wellington Fringe Festival), also a contemporary work for two women dancers with circular, minimalist staging. Both choreographies draw the audience in rather than projecting or brandishing thematic content despite the fearless presentation of imagery and ideas; in Double Goer exceptions to this quality include a section of relentless screaming from both dancers, and an el Día de los Muertos balaclava solo. When considered alongside Hannah Playhouse’s limited sightlines and the frequency of downstage, floor-based placement and choreography, the best seating for Double Goer is undoubtedly as close as possible to the stage. Production images from 2023 reveal significant costume changes in this iteration of Double Goer, and earlier reviews mention dolls (poppet/voodoo) which do not appear in this season; commentary on these production development decisions could add welcome insight to future programme notes. At times, the abstraction/obscurity of thematic content distracts from the focus of Foster-Sproull’s vigorously original and beautifully intelligent choreography, however, the work is unfailingly engaging, and clearly thoroughly researched. Double Goer is received warmly by a full house, with Foster Group deservedly earning an enthusiastic following beyond their Auckland home.