High Octane: Review

I’m not what you’d call a rev-head. Or a motor-head. Or diesel-head, if that’s a thing? I’m not a car person basically, and I don’t have much of an interest in cars as a hobby or as a metaphor for the glitzy, plastic pastiche of excess that defined early 2000’s culture and entertainment.

High Octane had an even higher bar to overcome, then, as I sat on the outside steps of the Campbelltown Arts Centre not knowing what to expect from an interpretive dance performance in general- let alone one meant to evoke the rush and adrenaline from something I was unfamiliar with, set in a time where my greatest concern was when the next episode of the Wiggles or, later on, Ed, Edd, and Eddy was to come on.

Director and performer Emma Harrison did something truly spectacular with this show, something I really was not expecting. Alongside her two stellar co-performers Emma Riches and Frances Orlina, they took that hour of my life and showed me all these things I was unfamiliar with using sound, light, and movement.

To quote the great Frank Reynolds: “I get it.”

There’s a dynamism to the movement, an expressiveness that shows exactly what it means to be hungry, to want more, to need more. With no expression, just some humour and some movement, I became keenly aware of everything I needed to.

Three racers - three women - hungry for fame, desperate for it, continually slamming wheels on asphalt, hateful towards each other but locked in this race where everyone else was just a spectator. The costume designs were brilliant, dark and tight and occasionally bursting into iris-grazing flashes of neon green (even toddler Michael remembers that exact shade of neon green colouring half the denizens of the early 2000s).

The peak of this show, perhaps unsurprisingly, is smack bang in the middle. It’s when the movements and the racers are at their fastest, but the music becomes this hypnotic, enthralling drone, a heavy engine being revved over and over. God, that exact set is stuck in my head still, the entire night is. Will it ever leave? I hope not.

There aren’t many shows that begin with someone in a car doing massive burnouts outside the Campbelltown Arts Centre, not deliberately anyway, but that spectacle was just the start of a performance that spoke to me in a language I didn’t know I could understand. It made my world a little broader, made me more aware of a world that might not exist anymore, having - like me - grown up into something a little stranger and a little changed.

High Octane was an entirely unique rush, something that sticks with you long after all that’s left on the road is smoke and skid marks.

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