- Title:
- Wet Hard Long 2024, Jenni Large
- Author:
- Elyse Goldfinch
- Date:
- 02.12.24
Jenni Large, Wet Hard Long, 2024, dress rehearsal performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Gianna Rizzo.
Wetter Harder Longer
A low throbbing base fills the room. Pulsating in a familiar rhythm, like the distant beat that exposes a nightclub down an alleyway – the kind with a flashing neon sign and a sleazy bouncer loitering by the entrance.
Inside, we encounter a darkened stage equipped with a surreal glistening ladder slicing through its centre and sprawling along the floor like serrated tentacles. Balancing from the structure’s core, a single sleek bucket is suspended, poised in wait. From the sculptural objects to the black mirrored flooring, everything is shimmering surfaces and sharp edges. A daring thrill of flirtation.
Jenni Large, Wet Hard Long, 2024, dress rehearsal performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Gianna Rizzo.
Anticipation is high by the time two dancers, Jenni Large and Amber McCartney, enter the stage. Moving in unison, they begin in a deliberate and lingering stride. Adorned in identical monotone beige outfits – loose t-shirts, leggings, fishnets and bedazzled gloves; punctuated by eight-inch glossy black platform heels (colloquially known as pleasers). Despite the confidence of their movements, these first steps appear precarious and calculated as if directing the gaze towards their mastery of balance.
Choreographer and lead dancer of Wet Hard Long, Large methodically draws attention to the remarkable potency of ecdysiasts and other female dancers, capturing not only their physical strength and endurance, but also their transgressive playfulness. In the first act, there’s a focus on the labour of female bodies that are the subjects of desire. As they navigate the stage in their platforms, the dancers’ supine pace accentuates every strenuous movement, challenging the audience to consider how limiting these markers of female sexuality can be.
Jenni Large, Wet Hard Long, 2024, dress rehearsal performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Gianna Rizzo.
As the dancers settle into the performance, their movements become more confident and grounded. Their platform shoes feel less like props and more like knife-like extensions of their bodies. Moving beyond Freudian cliches of high heel as phallic symbols (and therefore signifiers of castration)1 the object fetishism here is subverted to draw a more nuanced connection between the female body and transhumanism.2 As the platforms are integrated with the body, they transform the female form into a physical weapon. In doing so, Wet Hard Long undermines contemporary culture’s endless pursuit of physical perfection and the relentless drive for body (co)modification.
When the dancers touch it’s often in a collision of violence and sensuality, a constant push and pull of attraction and repulsion. They balance perilously atop one another, heels interlocked like knives. At a moment of climax, Large takes McCartney’s flesh-colour gloved finger into her mouth before entirely stripping the away glove using her teeth. While reminiscent of a burlesque striptease, the proposition of seduction is destabilised as it comes to appear more like skin being ripped away from the body, capturing Large’s ability to move seamlessly between desire and horror.
Jenni Large, Wet Hard Long, 2024, dress rehearsal performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Gianna Rizzo.
Over the duration of the performance, Large and McCartney’s movements become more animal-like, predatory. Their pace quickens as they stalk around the stage in an increasingly intimidating manner. From the moody setting to the predaceous stride, I am reminded of a repeated scene in the 2013 sci-fi thriller Under the Skin where Scarlett Johansson plays an alien dressed in human skin who prowls the streets of Glasgow to seduce and kill men. Once she captures her male target, the scene cuts to her and the victim, standing naked in a deep pool of water in a pitch-black room. Each time, Johansson’s character stalks towards her prey as he slowly submerges into the water, never to be seen again.
Water plays a pivotal role in Wet Hard Long, becoming both a symbolic and physical device in which the dancers play. In one scene, they balance steel water-filled buckets between their calves as they sluggishly pour the liquid over their chests. As the liquid continues to spill, almost to the point of absurdity, the scene hastily slips away from the eroticism of Flashdance’s infamous wet chair dance into something more akin to waterboarding. Once the glossy obsidian floor is soaked, the dancers slam themselves around the stage in harmonising movements, splashing pools of water everywhere, creating a paradox between glistening fantasy and embodied rage.
Jenni Large, Wet Hard Long, 2024, dress rehearsal performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Gianna Rizzo.
Jenni Large, Wet Hard Long, 2024, dress rehearsal performance documentation, Dancehouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Gianna Rizzo.
The dancers’ synced movements become increasingly uncanny, as if they are doubles of one another, hermetically enclosed. In psychoanalysis, the double often represents an alternative version of the self. The double may be a shadow, a mirror, a haunting, or an involuntary repetition of an act. The doubling in this performance disturbs the boundary between each dancer, so even the most minute difference between a gesture from one performer to another appears conspicuous. Large escalates this tension as she crawls dangerously atop the ladder sculpture while McCartney mimics her movements along the floor directly underneath. This scene ruptures their tether as they begin to move out of time with one another, before returning together for a final display of collective strength and tenacity.
The defiance inherent in this dance feels like a warning. Cautioning audiences against a patriarchal vision of the female body, resisting a world where women and those who are ‘othered’ continue to be reduced to their parts. Large creates a world that embraces the masochistic pleasure of fantasy while celebrating the strength of female endurance. In doing so, this work troubles normative assumptions about gender identity and sexual difference…or indifference. Exiting the confines of this gritty and glamorous dystopian disco, I was left with an unflinching and satisfying perspective of the female experience - its fury, humour, beauty and determination.
See Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism (London: Read Books ltd, 2014) (originally published 1914); or for an alternative view: Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014).
Transhumanism refers to the real and/or speculative augmentation of the human body through technology. The term was originally conceived in Julian Huxley’s “Transhumanism,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 8, 1 (1968):73-76,
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Wet Hard Long by Jenni Large was shown at Dancehouse, Naarm Melbourne, 4 - 13 July 2024.
Elyse Goldfinch's review of Wet Hard Long has been co-commissioned by Performance Review and Dancehouse.
Performance Review has partnered with Dancehouse to commission critical writing, responding to Dancehouse’s 2024 seasons. This writing has been independently commissioned and edited by Performance Review and financed by Dancehouse as a means of addressing these organisations’ mutual desire to build dance literacy in arts writing and to critically support emerging choreographic practice.
Elyse Goldfinch is a curator and writer living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. She is currently Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) where she contributes to exhibitions and oversees publications and public programs. She was co-curator of Tennant Creek Brio: Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis, 2024; lead curator of From the other side, 2023-24; and curated the major durational performance installation, Lucy Guerin: NEWRETRO, 2023.
Previously, Elyse was co-Chair and co-Director at Firstdraft, Australia's longest running Artist Run Initiative; and Associate Curator at Artspace Sydney, where she co-curated 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS and the 2019-2022 editions of the NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship; alongside other roles including the Curatorial Team of the Australian Pavilion at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia, 2022; and coordinator for Contemporary Arts Organisations Australia, a network of sixteen non-profit peer organisations from every state and territory across Australia, 2018-2022.
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