By Peter Maddern
Shaun Parker’s Happy As Larry is a delightful expose of our often incongruous and mostly fruitless search for happiness. Timothy Ohl welcomes us with his doodling on a black board that later reveals itself to be just one face of a shipping container size backdrop that floats and swirls its way across the stage. As such it eschews, whether driven by a search for originality or financial pragmatism, the high tech light shows that seem too often to sit in contemporary dance productions as the attraction rather than the dancing itself.
Here, it is inventive in the extreme as the container presents variously as a wall, diving board and source of propulsion. Ohl’s scribble fest to the tangled beats of Nick Wales’ and Bree Van Reyk’s musical score that produced something almost Pollockesque was but one highlight of the night.
The dancers, eight of them, decked out in casual fare, present as if plucked off any Sunday’s Bondi boardwalk – young, athletic and without latte pretensions. Lewis Rankin’s roller skating added not only variety but his brief but touching pas de deux with Marnie Palomares was also memorable.
That a dance production is held together – directed and constrained – by something so ephemeral as sticks of chalk speaks to the skill of the choreography and child-like mood that happiness is synonymous with. The dancers then take us forward and back between the adult and child worlds where the search gets muddled by dreams, expectations and the involvement with others.
A delightful respite from cold winter evenings and increasingly bleak economic conditions, all contemporary dance fans should see it.
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