The Age

In Infinite Temporal Series expatriate Australian Prue Lang immerses the audience in an infinitely intriguing experience.  It is deliberately intimate, with the tiny audience situated in close proximity to the dancers in a series of rooms, each with a bench along one wall.  Each room has a frame in the back wall, allowing the audience to see through to the next, or look back towards the first.  Audience members are encouraged to move from one room to the next, though it can be equally satisfying to remain in one place throughout the 35-minute presentation.
At first, it feels like one of those lessons in the art of perspective, with the performers diminishing in size, becoming more remote the further they are distanced from the viewer.  A dancer stands motionless in each room. All begin slowly and simultaneously with a slow twist, drawing a languorous hand up the front of the body to reach upwards, then stepping out into a sweeping spiral.  One is caught between watching the close-up detail of the proximal dancer, or enjoying the synergy of the ensemble.
The dancers maintain a distanced focus, but we can see the tremble of muscles, the flicker of eyelashes, and hear the harsh breathing as they are pulled or projected violently by some apparently external force.  Over this, one dancer addresses his audience in a gentle treatise on being and not being.  The words appear to have no direct relationship to the action, but somehow influence our thinking.
Gradually the dancers introduce different movements so that we see contrasts in energy or direction from a single dancer, set against the synchronicity of the group.  The intricacy increases, but we have been led into it slowly, learning to enjoy the multiplicity of choices.  The serendipitous intrusions of audience members as they move from one room to another, taking up positions to look forward or backwards to see through to the front room become framed like portraits.  We see our neighbours in a new light – unwittingly becoming performers in a completely unthreatening way.
This is a profoundly satisfying work, carefully polished – not to be missed. (Hilary Crampton)