“Mortal Engine” is a performance work created in 2007/8 by the company Chunky Move under the direction of Gideon Obarzanek and a team of outstanding artists working in areas that already placed interdisciplinarity at the core of their creative processes. It is not a dance work, nor is it a piece of theater, or a piece of digital music. It is neither an interactive work nor a synaesthetic experience. In essence, it is all of these things melded together to create an exploratory hybridity, a coalescence of human and technological forms.
The work is in flux: “Mortal Engine” has a hybridity that results in a series of simultaneously existing states that are yet to collapse into a singularity. Even gravity is compromised as dancers attempt to navigate a sloped stage area that doubles as a modular projection surface. In “Mortal Engine”, the limits of the human body are an illusion. Kinetic energy fluidly metamorphoses from the human figure into light image, into sound and back again in a constant state of becoming. Emanating from within, crackling light and staining shadows represent the most perfect or sinister of souls. Connection and disconnection, isolation and togetherness, duets are seen both as couples and as singular selves struggling to escape inner darkness— mortality, sexuality, desire. Drawing on the kinetics of the interior, enveloping lasers and movement-responsive video projections paint an ever-shifting, shimmering world. Witnessing moments of exquisite cosmological perfection or grotesque evolutionary accidents of existence, we are ceaselessly driven forwards by the reality of permanent change.

Direction and Choreography: Gideon Obarzanek; Interactive System Design: Frieder Weiss; Laser and Sound Artist: Robin Fox; Composer: Ben Frost; Costume Design: Paula Levis; Lighting Design: Damien Cooper; Supported by: The Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Victoria, The Sydney Festival.

Damien Cooper (US) has designed lighting for diverse dance Companies.

Gideon Obarzanek (AU), independent performer and choreographer. Founder and artistic director of Chunky Move.

Ben Frost (IS), composer, produces gallery-based installations, scores commissioned for film, contemporary dance and large-scale multimedia productions.

Frieder Weiss (DE) is an engineer in the arts and expert for real-time computing and interactive computer systems in performance art.

Paula Levis (AU) fashion designer, has designed for numerous production companies including Victorian Opera, Danceworks, Dancehouse, DanceNorth, Red Stitch Actor’s Theatre and La Mama.