> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://melbournestagereview.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The choreography of attention: Chunky Move’s Time Remaining - URL: https://melbournestagereview.com/the-choreography-of-attention-chunky-moves-time-remaining/ - Published: 2026-08-22T05:35:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-22T06:22:04.000Z - Description: Hamilton’s Time Remaining is an exhilaratingly intelligent work: visually assured, formally adventurous, and alive to the peculiar contemporary anxiety of being engulfed by the technological systems of our own making. - Author: Ellen M. Scott - Tags: Reviews By the time we enter, [*Time Remaining*](https://chunkymove.com/works/time-remaining/?ref=melbournestagereview.com) has already begun. Four lines of laser light scan the vast timber floor of Melbourne Town Hall. Forward. Back. Forward. Back. They move with an almost tidal rhythm, though with cutting precision. Where light meets floor it looks improbably hot, as though it will scorch. Alongside this, Antony Hamilton’s sound design sits low beneath the recurring movement, atmospheric and textural, until every so often the laser apparatus re-announces itself with a great inorganic crack: an uncanny kind of thunder. We take our seats but keep talking. It isn’t yet clear that we shouldn’t. Only gradually do I notice that, far away beneath the great Town Hall organ, six figures are already moving. Or perhaps I should say: only gradually do I realise that I have not been watching the whole performance. They have been there all along, moving slowly and independently on the dimly lit stage, apparently indifferent to whether we have noticed them. From high above the floor, Paula Levis’s elaborate costumes register before faces: a Rococo-inflected body in grey-green, with a vast ruffled skirt and extravagant headdress; a Harlequin in diamond motley; a Pierrot figure almost swallowed by voluminous white; another performer carrying an enormous, misshapen papier-mâché head. Two more figures are black-clad, out of some goth-glam, New Romantic past, their costumes flashing with chains, metallic trim and jewelled gloves. The ensemble’s white-painted faces are smudged with heavy black around the eyes. ![A dancer in an elaborate green ruffled costume and white-painted face stands alone in a pool of light on the darkened Melbourne Town Hall stage during Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/2026.08.18_NowOrNever_ChunkyMove_TimeRemaining_Dress_Rehersal-22.jpg) Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: William Hamilton-Coates Melbourne Town Hall makes a strange theatre. *Time Remaining* — Antony Hamilton’s new work for [Chunky Move](https://chunkymove.com/?ref=melbournestagereview.com), commissioned by [Now or Never](https://nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au/homepage?ref=melbournestagereview.com) and receiving its world premiere here — occupies both its conventional stage and the enormous floor in front of it. It is difficult to imagine a more apt architecture for a work concerned with bodies encountering systems far larger than themselves, whether technological or social, or a strange mix of the two. Hamilton’s performers begin in a loose, almost pre-social disorder, each seemingly caught within a small rockpool of their own movement. Each body follows its own peculiar rhythm: slow, loose, sometimes ungainly, rarely conventionally beautiful or virtuosic. The six performers — Madeleine Bowman, Melissa Pham, Lee Serle, Samakshi Sidhu, Jayden Wall and Jareen Wee — share a stage without yet appearing obliged to share a language. They begin to find one another through the layers that clothe them: garments pass between bodies, gloves come off and reappear elsewhere, pieces accumulate on the floor and are picked up again. Desire arrives abruptly, with a strange matter-of-factness. A man and woman find one another. They kiss, undress each other, and end up entangled on the floor: he is naked from the waist down, she from the waist up. It is carnal without being especially romantic or voyeuristic. For a moment, sex is simply something bodies do. Then they descend. The performers leave the small world of the organ stage, and enter the vast floor beneath us: the territory the lasers have been quietly surveying all along. Something begins to change. The idiosyncrasy of clothing and colour disappears. Movement becomes smaller, sharper. Freeform particularity gives way to counted patterns: pairs form, phrases recur, one body echoes another. At one point they arrange themselves in a tight line, one behind another, bent at the knees. Then a shudder travels through them from front to back, like electricity. It is exquisite. By now, I realise I am hungry for this kind of pattern. The work has offered so much dispersal — six bodies following private logics, lasers tracing their own immaculate courses — that each brief convergence feels like a reward. A phrase catches. Bodies agree. For a few seconds, something coheres. My own pleasure in this gives me pause. Synchrony is not synonymous with hierarchy; it is also one of the ways bodies make connection possible. Moving together reduces the bewildering number of things another person might do. It creates predictability, relation, sometimes even the felt sense of shared agency. The work’s increasing order is seductive before it is troubling. ![Performers move across the vast timber floor of Melbourne Town Hall as blue and violet laser beams cut through the space between them in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/GRPhoto_CM-TimeRemaining_Socials-17.jpg) Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: Gianna Rizzo *Time Remaining* could easily give us a familiar story. Another fable preoccupied with technology disciplining human beings. Its own promotional language flirts with such a reading, casting the performer as an endangered figure in an escalating contest with technology. But the lasers have not commanded these dancers to synchronise. They seem to do that all by themselves. There is pleasure in it. Relief, even. Through coordination, six unruly bodies briefly become more legible to one another; complexity narrows as a shared rhythm takes hold. There is a small thrill in disparate bodies becoming, momentarily, one. But the experiment in finding order does not last. Soon, there is a rebellious eruption. Bodies run feverishly through the hall, loose and exposed, several dancers now wearing very little. Movement expands. Mischief rules. The group remains collective in this fever, without becoming uniform. There is joy in it, or something very close: an exhilarating release into amplitude, speed, flesh. Hamilton seems to be imagining bodies exceeding the pattern, but he stubbornly refuses to let the work settle there. *Time Remaining* is less interested in humans breaking free from a top-down force, and far more absorbed in charting the shifting terms of relation: when coordination feels connective, when it becomes constraining, and when collectivity can loosen without necessarily dissolving a sense of belonging. The Town Hall complicates my own relationship to all this as spectator. From the balcony, I can read Hamilton’s structures almost diagrammatically: lines, pairings, trajectories, bodies moving through a field. But there is much less acuity in my perception of faces, breath and the sinew of movement. ![Six performers are dispersed across the vast timber floor of Melbourne Town Hall beneath suspended lighting equipment, with a single bright laser beam cutting diagonally through the space in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/2026.08.19_NowOrNever_ChunkyMove_TimeRemaining_Dress-36-1.jpg) Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: William Hamilton-Coates The vantage point calls up one of my earliest memories. I am perhaps three years old, standing over an immaculate model railway at a friend’s house, transfixed by the discovery that a whole world could be seen in miniature. I remember thinking, with the peculiar grandiosity of a small child who had somehow heard about such things: *so this is what God sees*. What astonished me was not power over that world so much as the sudden legibility of the collective: detail, relation, route and pattern made available all at once. It strikes me that although the viewing distance in *Time Remaining* deprives me of one kind of spectatorship, it makes another unusually available. To describe it, I find myself wanting to use *fascinate* as a verb. I begin to fascinate: to follow patterns, test relations, watch structures form and dissolve, let one question proliferate into another. And perhaps that altered attention is also why the dancers no longer seem automatically entitled to be the centre of this work. If Hamilton wanted *Time Remaining* to hit me in the gut or the heart, he largely misses. What he hits, with considerable force, is the head. I leave mentally detonated, the thinking space still widening as I step back into the heart of this great Melbourne metropolis. That is not necessarily the encounter everyone will want. The ten-year-old beside me begins sighing audibly somewhere around halfway; afterwards, my companion tells me that within ten minutes he had lost the thread completely (though I don't believe that was meant as a critique). *Time Remaining* does not necessarily make its conceptual architecture easy to read from inside it. But difficulty is not the same thing as vacancy. ![A silhouetted dancer stands on the timber floor of Melbourne Town Hall holding a trailing costume piece, while other performers move in the distance beneath bright crossing laser beams in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/2026.08.18_NowOrNever_ChunkyMove_TimeRemaining_Dress_Rehersal-47.jpg) Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: William Hamilton-Coates In one of the work's strangest passages, the dancers move shoulder to shoulder through the room. Travelling back towards the organ they sob; moving away again they laugh, wildly, almost hysterically. Back: grief. Away: laughter. Again. It reads as somewhat insincere: feeling becomes performance, reproducible on command. Around this point, another figure enters from the small bank of spectators seated downstairs. From my angle it is briefly unclear whether she belongs to the work at all. The performers pull her into their world, strip and recostume her: black tights, a flesh-coloured crop, a large dark wig, white cap, an absurdly long prosthetic nose. Then they abandon her. For a moment she appears almost overwhelmed by the exposure. But rather than crumple, she dances. I hesitate to make her mean too much. From elsewhere in the hall, even the circumstances of her arrival may have been invisible. But her movement thereafter retains an unsettled quality: sometimes incorporated, sometimes peripheral, sometimes echoing movement from the edges of this unstable world. She is not the only body learning how to fit itself to the conditions around it. The whole group performs a gesture so familiar that its strangeness almost passes unnoticed. Again, lined up shoulder to shoulder, they face outward as though posing for a group photo. There is no photographer waiting. No flash. No visible reason for moving bodies to suddenly flatten themselves into an image. And yet we know the pose. There is a bodily intelligence involved in becoming photographable: the minute adjustment of posture, face and proximity; the knowledge that movement must resolve into something another person can capture. The body anticipates the image before the apparatus arrives. And then, a few minutes after the group pose had dissolved back to dance, the apparatus does appear. At first, it is one photographer. He enters while two dancers continue a tight, mechanical phrase. They do not immediately stop. A body turns slightly towards him. A movement becomes a little more available to the lens. A pause holds. Another photographer arrives. Then another. The transition is gradual. Joining the fray, two dancers sit slumped at opposite ends of a desk on wheeled chairs, absorbed in laptops while the desk, chairs and bodies spin slowly around the floor. I think they yawn. Eventually, after they have joined the spectacle of photography, one dancer stands on the desk with the screen held absurdly close to his face. Across the hall, bodies are being organised by things that do not need to touch them to have power over them. They don't need to oppress to exercise influence. A screen can hold a person almost motionless. A camera can redirect movement without issuing an instruction. The possibility of being seen can alter a body before anyone is visibly looking. And this is where the reach of *Time Remaining* extends unmistakably beyond the Town Hall. Human beings have always adjusted themselves for audiences; there is no pristine, unperformed self hiding beneath social life. But networked technologies have radically changed the architecture of the exchange. We increasingly present ourselves within systems that determine whether and how we become visible. Researchers Kristen Barta and Nazanin Andalibi describe tech platforms and algorithms as “[visibility agents](https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3660337?ref=melbournestagereview.com)”. That is, because their operations are partly opaque, users infer what is rewarded from the signals that come back — engagement, reach, recommendations — and adapt themselves accordingly. The rules do not need to be written down, or even fully known or agreed with, to become effective. And the presence of photographers in *Time Remaining* renders this idea recognisably *bodily*. ![Six dancers with pale theatrical makeup cluster together in the darkened Melbourne Town Hall, their bodies caught mid-movement beneath bright diagonal laser beams in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/4e/1d/4e1d8918-61fe-47b0-a53e-03b9c2038472/content/images/2026/08/GRPhoto_CM-TimeRemaining_Socials-26-1.jpg) Chunky Move’s **Time Remaining* at Melbourne Town Hall. Photo: Gianna Rizzo Soon there are perhaps ten or twelve photographers circulating through the dancers, cameras raised. Shutters accumulate in the soundscape. Flashes erupt across the floor. The dancers turn, extend, hold, reposition. Movement resolves into pose. Pose transforms into another. Again. Again. It is an ecstatic feedback loop, as they begin organising themselves around the conditions of being seen. The cameras offer something the lasers never did: recognition. A laser can structure space, illuminate or obscure, even appear to threaten a body. A camera carries the promise that somebody is interested. Human beings are not foolish for wanting that. Visibility can mean surveillance, but it can also mean participation, recognition, evidence that someone has noticed we are here. But this frenzied participation makes the sequence more troubling than a simple warning against technology. Digital systems did not invent the desire to be recognised any more than machines invented our desire to move together. And this is what I admire so much about the work. *Time Remaining* reflects back a peculiarly contemporary anxiety: the possibility of being engulfed by systems of our own making, seduced into them by appetites that are genuinely our own. Dance is an almost perfect medium for describing this collective terror. Text does not intervene to assign motive or blame; bodies simply show us relation becoming habit, pleasure becoming pattern, participation becoming capture. It's as if the act of photography gradually becomes less like documentation of choreography than choreography's replacement. Bodies that once took slow, eccentric routes through space become extraordinarily efficient at producing versions of themselves. And just as the heap of bodies performing for the lens reaches the pinnacle of its orgy — performers climbing over one another to occupy its centre for just one more delicious moment — the photographers leave. The dancers are not liberated. They are bereft. Bodies slacken. Faces contort. They seem strung out. They retreat towards the great organ, their point of origin. Fragments of their earlier theatrical selves seem to gather around them. There is something circular in it, but nothing has been restored. As if the costumes can return, but the conditions under which those bodies first inhabited them cannot. And below, the lasers continue to move. Earlier I watched those lines of light as apparatus: beautifully engineered, potentially dangerous, unmistakably inorganic. But as humans recede, the lasers start swinging through the room at an oddly bodily scale, tracing something like the action of human feet: leaping, landing, springing away again. For a moment, I could swear the lasers are dancing. The system learning. The system alive. Kudos to Nicholas Moloney, Nick Roux and Joli Boardman: through their design and execution, the system seems suddenly animate, capable of occupying the full range of the space — and of our attention. Two days later, the same Town Hall space is open again for a free laser exhibit: Robin Fox's [PRESENCE](https://nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au/event/presence?ref=melbournestagereview.com). The human performers have gone home. The machines remain: untired, repeatable, still drawing an audience. It strikes me that *Time Remaining* starts to feel less like a title than a question. --- [*Time Remaining*](https://nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au/event/time-remaining?ref=melbournestagereview.com) was presented at Melbourne Town Hall as part of [Now or Never ](https://nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au/?ref=melbournestagereview.com)festival, 19–20 August 2026.