IDEA '25 and Form Dance Projects
There's something profoundly generous about watching masters of their craft willingly expose the mechanics of evolving practices. ON TAP, featuring Peter Trotman, Tony Osborne, and Andrew Morrish, offers exactly this: three seasoned improvisers presenting intimate solo investigations that circle around vulnerability, time, and the stubborn persistence of creative curiosity.
Andrew Morrish opens with a 20-minute meditation that immediately establishes his conversational intimacy. With the audience also illuminated alongside him, he delivers what feels less like a performance and more like philosophical musings from a charming dinner companion. His premise is disarmingly simple: life is about doing the best we can with faulty equipment, that equipment being ourselves. At 73, Morrish reflects on how every past action has conspired to bring him to this precise moment, this particular space. There's a lightness to his delivery that belies the weight of the observation, a quality that speaks to decades of practice in finding spontaneity within structure.
The transition to Tony Osborne arrives as his head poking through the stage curtain, caught in a single spotlight. Where Morrish offered philosophical distance, Osborne brings raw immediacy. Again, speaking directly to the audience, he articulates something many mature performers know but rarely voice so plainly: that dance, as the body ages, increasingly becomes about the upper body. His delivery carries an almost pleading quality, seeking engagement and understanding. This vulnerability, performed yet utterly authentic, creates an intimacy that makes the work memorable, precisely because it refuses the armour of theatrical convention.
Peter Trotman's concluding piece shifts registers entirely, with a deep richness that begins by employing sailing as an extended metaphor for dance and navigating life's latter chapters. His storytelling feels more constructed than his colleagues' approaches, weaving together movement, imagined smells, sounds, and the persistent thirst, both literal and metaphorical, for water to quench an unnameable need. The authenticity of his narrative holds even as it concludes with self-aware irony: "There must be a catch, because this was too easy."
What emerges across these three distinct solo investigations is a shared ethos inherited from Al Wunder's Theatre of the Ordinary, where all three trained in the 1980s. Each performer employs language and physicality in vastly different proportions, yet all share a commitment to mining the present moment for whatever riches it contains. ON TAP recognises difference over uniformity. These aren't three variations on a theme, but three entirely separate inquiries that happen to share the same stage.
The challenge, and perhaps the point, is that ON TAP resists easy categorisation. Is it dance-theatre? Performance art? Extended stand-up meditation? The work sits rather wonky between disciplines, which may frustrate audiences seeking conventional theatrical satisfaction. Yet for those willing to meet these artists where they are, the show offers something rarer: three individuals modelling what it means to continue investigating your practice when you're the members of a unique generation, and knowing there's still time to share this work.
These performers have over 40 years each of engagement with improvisation. They've taught thousands of students across continents, curated festivals, developed methodologies. Now, in their 60s and 70s, they're choosing to share not polished virtuosity, but the messy, honest process of reckoning with mature bodies, and the need to pass these skills forward.
ON TAP isn't for everyone. It demands patience with a talky, cerebral performance, and comfort with the unvarnished realities of aging. But for those interested in what performance looks like when stripped of pretense, when three master practitioners simply show up and think aloud about what it means to still be doing this work, ON TAP offers a quietly radical model of artistic maturity.
More info: https://www.form.org.au/on-tap/
Comments
Post a Comment