Review: Elise Antonia & Marlon Matenhese / PARADIGM

Paradigm is captioned as a miraculous story based on the true events of a young woman’s experience maturing into her womanhood. Notwithstanding the seriousness of the theme, the performance began leisurely to calm lounge music and soft pink lighting, with a juxtaposition of short duet and solo sections by Elise Antonia and Marlon Matenhese, whose expressionist style was beautifully carried by the gestures and the music. In particular, Antonia’s elaborate use of the OK gesture (similar to the hamsasya used in classical Indian dance) for tracing serpentine arcs on the floor and stretching an invisible elastic string, insinuated the latitudes of youth coupled with the limits of femininity experienced by a young woman. What followed was a short duet in which the dancers’ bodies, instead of moving to the tune became the tune itself, their movements flowing like the high and low notes in a musical octave. But this happy-go-lucky section quickly transformed into a melancholic moment with a marked silence, heavy breathing, and Matenhese’s creatively disjointed moves hinting at broken limbs, to the accompaniment of a crackling sound. Bolstering gestural representations of writing, boxing, unboxing, finding space and breaking free, Paradigm was a clever attempt at blending miracle and maturity, the two keywords that distinctly stood out from piece’s description.