Choreographers

After graduating deferred science at university Gideon Obarzanek studied at the Australian Ballet School. He later danced with the Queensland Ballet and the Sydney Dance Company before working as an independent performer and choreographer with various dance companies and independent projects within Australia and abroad.

Gideon founded Chunky Move in 1995 and has been its Artistic Director to date. While the company mostly features his work, it also commissions other Australian choreographers and invites international dance artists to give workshops in its home city of Melbourne, Australia. Obarzanek’s works for Chunky Move have been diverse in form and content, and have included stage productions, installations, site-specific works and film. His works have been performed in many festivals and theatres in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, USA and different states in South America.


Artist Statement

“When I look back over the work I have made in the last five or six years, I can see two main areas of interest.

The first is my engagement with technology to create imagistic works that look at how we perceive our own bodies and the space around us. I use technology to create impressions of other layers we cannot see but which we feel or know to exist. My work with Frieder Weiss for example creates a sense of things that emanate from and surround the body or are connected to it. These are not narrative works. Combined with the movement and composition, the technology becomes an integral part of the aesthetic and kinaesthetic stimulus experienced by the viewers.
 
The second strand of work is completely different. Productions like Tense Dave and Two Faced Bastard are about human behaviour and how people get along together, or don’t. In both these works I am dealing with people trying to connect to one another, often with limited success. This sense of aloneness is common to both strands of my work.
 
I love formal works that deal with bodies in space as compositional shapes that are kinetic and spatial, but I tend to undermine myself when I try to make formal work. To me, bodies in space very quickly reveal themselves as people in a situation, or in a relationship of some sort. People on stage cannot be absolutely abstract. My dilemma with this inherent flux of the human figure in dance as both a shape and a person is both a weakness and a strength. On the one hand I cannot achieve the abstraction I am interested in seeing on stage, but on the other I am making work with which audiences identify because there are recognizable people with character and feelings.”
Gideon Obarzanek



Portrait

Unwilling to settle: a choreographer of diverse aesthetic

Gideon Obarzanek is the Artistic Director of one of Australia’s most prolific contemporary dance companies, Chunky Move. Based in Melbourne, Obarzanek is a major player in the city’s lively dance scene, where his company’s impressive studios host classes and performances by the company and associated artists. Obarzanek founded Chunky Move in 1995. His diverse aesthetics and unwillingness to settle for any singular form or thematic concern have enabled him to access a wide range of collaborators and opportunities in Australia, but for a long time prevented the company from gaining a foothold on international touring. Obarzanek has made works for film, set in nightclubs, using a revolve, and employing text and “pure dance”, but it was not until his successful dance and technology solo work, Glow, that he began to achieve international recognition. In 2008 Obarzanek created Mortal Engine, an ensemble piece with a similarly virtuosic use of technology and the company has toured almost constantly since then.

Obarzanek is a choreographer who collaborates with ease. His dancers are all credited in the creation of the work and his award winning partnerships with sound artists, designers, filmmakers, and theatre directors demonstrate his ability to absorb new influences. Obarzanek plays a leading role in the Australian dance sector by mentoring young artists, speaking at public forums and supporting independent choreographers through programmes like The Next Move, which produces work from dancers associated with Chunky Move, and Choreolab, a research initiative which invites high profile international choreographers such as Xavier Le Roy to work in Melbourne. /Sophie Travers


Selected Works

Two Faced Bastard (2008), together with choreographer Lucy Guerin
Mortal Engine (2008)
Glow (2006), together with computer programmer Frieder Weiss
I Want to Dance Better at Parties (2004)
Tense Dave (2003), together with choreographers Lucy Guerin, Michael Kantor