Amber McCartney’s solo dance work Tiny Infinite Deaths was a big success when it premiered in 2022 in an artist development program called Pieces, presented by Melbourne’s Lucy Guerin Inc and The Substation. It was the kind of leg-up independent artists need if they are to be seen and Tiny Infinite Deaths was indeed seen by many influential people, including Amy Hollingsworth, artistic director of Brisbane-based Australasian Dance Collective. Which is how it came to be included in ADC’s third iteration of its annual triple bill THREE.

Tiny Infinite Deaths was something of an outlier in the program in that it wasn’t a new work commissioned by ADC for its dancers or, if an already existing work, performed by its dancers. Hollingsworth said ahead of the opening of THREE 2024 that she wanted in the future always to include an independent artist. It’s a generous impulse. 

Tiny Infinite Deaths was centrally placed between ADC commissions by Alisdair Macindoe and Jenni Large where it shone like a fine, if unorthodox, jewel. 

For the entirety of her 20-minute solo McCartney was encased in a segmented onesy of pale hue (Andrew Treloar’s design) that made her into a fair facsimile of the maggot she claimed would be the viewer’s guide “through the in-between”. In her brief program note McCartney gave no further thoughts on the nature of that in-between. Ideas of decay and transformation were obviously present, as was an element of disgust.  Where these took the viewer was up to the individual.

Apparently unseeing and propelled by Makeda Zucco’s pulsating score, McCartney sat bolt upright, jack knifed to touch face to feet, sinuously curved her spine and rolled swiftly across the floor. Occasionally she stood but for the most part looked completely alien, comical even, but admirable in her physical virtuosity. You simply could not look away.

But what of those tiny, infinite deaths? McCartney’s fluttering fingers, shudders and convulsions spoke of something more potent than a base-level nervous system doing its thing before it turned into something else and then died. What about that handful of academic dance steps that came from nowhere? Were they random movements that meant nothing or shadows from past lives lurking within an organism that helps make the world go round?

The “in-between” is a difficult, disconcerting place, neither here nor there. It’s also the passage between birth and the grave, that path we all have to tread for whatever length of time given. In its own short time span Tiny Infinite Deaths strikes quite a chord.

The six charismatic ADC dancers – Tyrel Dulvarie, Harrison Elliott, Lilly King, Taiga Kita-Leong, Lily Potger and Georgia Van Gils – were credited as collaborators on Macindoe’s Dull Boy choreography and again on Large’s Truth Beauty Suffering, which closed the program.

Dull Boy, danced to Macindoe’s own score, and Truth Beauty Suffering (to music by Anna Whitaker) both offered views on the ills of capitalism.

Dull Boy was driven by Macindoe’s antipathy towards social media and his belief in the malign effect on society. Simple freeze-frame poses at the beginning effectively suggested people in thrall to their mobile devices, although the alienation that followed could in truth be sheeted home to any number of societal ills. The score, composed by Macindoe, had thundery rumblings, forceful beats and pulses surrounded by unearthly clouds of sound. It was immersive and unsettling. 

Against this backdrop dancers, wearing attractive loose-fitting street gear (designed by the multi-tasking Macindoe and Chloe Greaves), connected with and disconnected from one another. They were by turns twitchy, pugilistic, robotic and agitated before ending with a powerful surge of collective anger.

Large wrote in her program note that Truth Beauty Suffering “explores the duel between romance and capitalism”. If I read her rightly, Large sees fragile souls who can’t escape the pressure to consume and conform and thus are deeply damaged.

It was a bleak and not entirely persuasive piece. The look (costumes by Bethany Cordwell) summoned thoughts of a particularly grungy circus, or possibly a fetish club. A long, layered tulle coat was passed from performer to performer and revealed to have the word MEAT on its back. At times dancers crawled about as if on leashes or slid on their backs while working their obliques. There were stares, screams and a fair bit of slapping of each other’s bodies. 

Truth Beauty Suffering had an idea of suffering that pretty much stayed on the surface. It didn’t feel felt. Whitaker’s score was interesting – woozily off-kilter and with a warped sense of romance – but the dance, at least for this viewer, didn’t go anywhere near far enough for discomfit.

THREE ends at the Brisbane Powerhouse on March 23.