On Agitato
The music begins - explosive, discordant, loud, played over a darkening space.
The notes overlap one another, sequences and canons overlaid with a sense of urgency. It is more than an overture - it is a gauntlet laid down, the choreographer issuing herself the challenge of meeting this crescendo.
We are seated in the Sylvia Staehli Theatre for Jo Lloyd’s latest: Agitato. Every seat is full. She has chosen black tarkett, the stage behind revealed with its black curtain, black pillars, black stairs. As the lights dim, it seems less like the light retreating and more like darkness oozing into the space. Thomas Woodman emerges from behind a pillar, walks to centre stage, and erupts into movement; bent elbows, a sharp downward dog. He completes the cycle, walks off stage, and two more dancers take his place, bursting into motion.
Once they have all entered, the four dancers remain onstage, or in brief costume changes. The physicality is exacting: Woodman has a recurring, sustained penché; all four pause with arms outstretched diagonally downwards, one foot in front of the other, heels raised; Harrison Ritchie-Jones contorts his spine while tipping his skull off-centre in a deceptively challenging sequence; Lee Serle’s hands appear to fly off the end of his long limbs.
_____
In writing about Agitato, one risks being reduced to a thesaurus: bursts, erupts, explodes, spurs, spills… These are the radical shifts in tone and rhythm that characterise Lloyd’s choreography. One also risks sounding vague in the recollection of her choreography; rapid-fire and exacting, it is hard to retain as distinct images. To describe Agitato is to risk describing all dance.
But that is not to say the work lacks refinement. On the contrary, the barrage of textures and shapes each speak to a deep research. It is a rare type of research; one that has been open to the public all year through ‘Happenings’ at Lloyd’s studio. But those isolated, inquisitive experiments have been crystallised into clarity for Agitato, flashing by in the blink of an eye but no less impressive for it.
I am reminded of 4/4, a similarly monumental performance in Melbourne contemporary dance in which an established artist (in that case, Antony Hamilton, and in this case, Lloyd) laid out their meticulous process via the medium of virtuosic performance. I am reminded too of how the assault of production elements disconnected me from that performance, and I am revelling by contrast in the joy of this performance - the stark lighting and our proximity to the performers. It is a physical closeness, but also a sense of immediacy - where the 4/4 performers were locked in to the difficulty and precision of their task to the extent that the audience was locked out, here their skill and concentration somehow doesn’t exclude the viewer. Perhaps because we are more than a viewer; we are a listener and a heat-sensor and and all-round experiencer. Reflecting on the construction of Agitato, Lloyd described wanting to “push out the space”¹. Indeed, seated in the front row, it feels as if the sweat from the performers could land on any one of us.
_____
Agitato is an ode to Fanny Mendelssohn (whose Allegro molto agitato in D Minor plays throughout the work, and from which Agitato takes its name). It is an uncomfortable collaboration across time between this young woman whose work was often unplayed or uncredited, and this middle-aged woman whose work is proudly witnessed. Just as we have incomplete fragments of Mendelssohn’s life, so too the audience are ever quite given access to the whole of Agitato 202 years later. The connection between the two is revealed in the program: “the truncated past of a musical career obscured by conventions”². It’s not clear whether Lloyd sees her own career as being impeded in the same way, or whether she sees, as I do, a difference in the way work by female artists is now received.
Lloyd’s impish humour hovers below the surface; she and Ritchie-Jones twice share an inaudible whispered exchange, and faces peer from behind columns as the piece nears its end. Although this obscuring of the whole is a hallmark of Lloyd’s choreography, it works particularly strongly alongside the theme of this piece. Similarly, Lloyd’s recurring tropes of removable clothing, distortion of balletic lines, and a swirling instability rarely on both feet, are used with precision. Agitato’s dancers are not claiming to be or to speak for Mendelssohn, but offering a glimpse into the restlessness that Lloyd imagines her feeling.
Perhaps Jo Lloyd works in a key. A musical key is not a melody written in advance, but a dialect within which to roam for a given project. It enables her to find a sense of coherence through the overlapping notes. Yet moving within this key retains something of that improvisational quality that keeps the work’s heartbeat pulsing. There is a connection - not over-intellectualised but felt in my body as an audience member - between Mendelssohn’s loud, sometimes discordant symphony and Lloyd’s high-speed canons and near-collisions.
_____
I have been writing about Agitato for 6 months now, on and off. This piece of writing lurks in the margins of every to-do list like the dancers melding in and out of sight behind the pillars of the Sylvia Staehli Theatre. What I have expressed does not capture what I felt on that August night, but as the time since then increases, I worry that I risk erasing something true but poorly expressed and rewriting it as something more refined but not truly of that moment. So I give to you my first public foray into reviewing dance, in the lineage of that tentative tango in which we try to capture something of the ephemeral so that a particular dance can be accessed by those not in the same place and time as the performers, while trying not to cause a reduction of that dance, all the while knowing it is impossible.
¹ Lloyd, J, conversation, 8 August 2025
² Dancehouse, ‘Agitato By Jo Lloyd’, Dancehouse (July 2025), https://www.dancehouse.com.au/whats-on/agitato/, retrieved August 2025
