The first thing you notice is the smell. Warm and earthy; a vague stench of decaying flora that slices through the chill. Somehow it permeates every corner of this space – the cavernous Mac 02 in Hobart, Tasmania, a warehouse turned theatre now turfed with a sprawling patchwork of grass.
In the centre lies the miasma’s culprit: a flesh-coloured pond ringed with its own miniature garden. There are proteas, kangaroo paws, gerberas. At this moment there is also a naked penis, yo-yoing wildly among the flowers.
It is 9pm on Thursday, the first night of Trance: a durational performance at Dark Mofo festival that runs from noon to midnight, three times over three days. The sun set four hours ago in the Tasmanian winter but it still feels too early for a swinging appendage. Its owner (the actor Omid Tabari, known mononymously as Omi) undulates stark naked to the jagged squeals of a noise show happening around them, seemingly impermeable to the plummeting temperatures. Their penis flaps; they shower themselves with a beer; they spit mandarin flesh at the other performers weaving through the crowd. “Somebody left his snakes at my lobby!” a vocalist screeches over a tinny microphone. This is either the best bush doof or the worst orgy.
Over the next three days at Trance – where I will spend 12 sunless hours in total – the mood oscillates violently. Within seconds, a meditation can become a mosh pit – and back. Vape clouds and dry ice mingle as one; the grass grows sodden with the stampede of performers – 13 in total, assembled from different countries – writhing, pirouetting, and stomping through their garden of hellish delights.
This is a work that defies anything as puerile as logic or taste; its mastermind – the Beijing-born, Berlin-based artist Tianzhuo Chen – has been developing it for the better part of a decade, and has staged it in China and Germany. He describes Trance as variously “a return to the inner multiplicity of the body” as well as “babies tripping”. It is part installation, part endurance theatre – and part bacchanal, talent quest, theme park, metal gig, vogue ball and Catholic mass. Sometimes, it is provocation for provocation’s sake. In other words, it is peak Dark Mofo – a brief return to the festival’s brutal, bloodied glory days.
Trance is nominally segmented into six instalments, each running for two hours. The goal, for both artist and audience, is to reach some nebulous state of nirvana where the world melts away and time collapses. Easier said than done, of course: on Friday, the first two sections of the early afternoon crawl along, with the performers idling around a loose smattering of cross-legged audience members. They play like prototypical villagers: one plants a new bud in the loam, another sets up camp near a cartoonishly oversized tree branch.
Stirred by the twinkle of celestial strings in the distance, a couple in the audience start doing yoga. Everything is idyllic, by which I mean it is extremely slow, verging on boring. Two hours feel like six. Is this what they meant by time collapsing?
You can enter and exit Trance at will: when I return a few hours later, the space is cast in overhead light beams that ripple like quasars. On a triptych of video screens, a family of conical aliens traipse through a landscape straight out of Dune. The villagers, in turn, take on an otherworldly rhythm. To a chiptune track pitched up to the high heavens, they dance as one, baby-kicking and quarter-turning at heart-palpitating speed. The effect is somewhere between a religious ritual and a Zumba class that wants you to die.
The speed hardly relents over the evening, bludgeoning us into a daze of sheer dizziness – but the audience remains somewhat subdued.An entire cross-section of Hobart has trickled through: Dark Mofo diehards in head-to-toe leather, men in business casual, people donning puffers and sweats as if on the way to the corner store. All of them sway and gasp politely at the right points but the energy is low: at several points, performers have to cajole the crowd into standing up. The exception is one guy wearing a tank top that reads “FUCK OFF I’M FISHING”. He headbangs so hard that he drops his drink.
On Saturday morning before the last day, Chen is in low spirits. He’s wearing pyjama pants with soil splotches blooming over white fleece; it turns out later that he has mistaken me for a reporter from Gardening Australia. “To be honest, I was a bit lost the last few days,” he says. “Because the beginning was so empty. Then suddenly, there was 300 people coming at the end just to destroy the grass.”
Each night the last two hours of Trance turn into a shuddering DJ set; it’s the one time the crowd reliably turns up. “They missed the best part of it!” says Chen, who blames the lacklustre response on Dark Mofo’s notoriously enigmatic marketing. “If you look at Dark Mofo’s website, they only say it’s a rave. I mean, what the fuck is this explanation? It’s just nothing, it’s just misleading, you know?”
Over Chen’s career, he has built a reputation for brash and profane performance work that teases – but never solidifies – its conceptual underpinnings. In describing Trance, he references Buddhist reincarnation – a six-stage cycle encompassing both heaven and hell. “Every day … is like a process of being reborn,” he says. “And the rave part is hell to me: people dancing and drinking and taking drugs. It’s kind of like hell, you know?”
That afternoon there’s a last-minute announcement from festival organisers: Trance, a ticketed event, will now be free for its last night. People come in slowly, then all at once: the throng explodes for live sets from the Berlin producer Dis Fig (real name Felicia Chen) and Björk collaborators Gabber Modus Operandi. Dis Fig’s voice stretches between banshee wail and siren song; at one point, she grasps my hand and tumbles to the earth, pulling me down with her.
After three days of bated breath, the next four hours are a release: body to body, skin on skin, sweat and hair flung through the air. Someone emerges from the dark with a fistful of smoking palo santo gaping from their mouth; a mosh circle materialises, bumping and grinding to an increasingly frantic BPM.
Then, within seconds, it halts. A final bait and switch. The overhead lights come on like an interrogation; the warehouse is silent for a beat. All the performers – each of Trance’s freaks and queens – rush the stage to the tune of Prince’s Purple Rain, sung at shrieking volume in a full-stadium singalong. Many of the troupe are red-eyed and overcome; a beam of white casts them in an artificial halo. If the rave is hell, then the comedown feels something like heaven.
Guardian Australia travelled to Hobart as a guest of Dark Mofo festival, which continues until 18 June
