Never Did Me Any Harm

Fractured voices emerge from the dark stage of Wharf 1, the audio splicing giving the feeling of flicking between radio stations. Beams of light slice across the space, finally widening to spotlight a pregnant woman (Sarah Jayne Howard) and a young man (Josh Mu). The audio settles into an extended discussion between a male and female voice on the vagaries of corporal punishment, and Mu and Howard move their bodies in a beautiful distortion of everyday gesture to the rhythms of speech.

 

Never Did Me Any Harm, a co-production between dance-theatre company Force Majeure and the Sydney Theatre Company, is a 60-minute collection of such scenes and interludes. Combining contemporary dance, theatricalised gesture and text garnered from over 90 interviews, director Kate Champion and her team explore an issue that seems to lie at the heart of middle-class Australia: how do we raise children well?It’s an important question and, from the audience reactions on opening night, obviously one which many people have contemplated. Without realising it, we’ve all formed opinions and battlecamps around the issues of parents and children. Never Did Me Any Harm taps into the conversations a lot of people are having at dinner parties, in offices, online, and the sense of familiarity (enhanced by Geoff Cobham’s realistic backyard set design) is occasionally eerie. The choreography, which draws so much from our day-to-day physical language, enhances and heightens this. There is a sense of camaraderie in the room: all around people are nodding in agreement, shaking their heads in shared distaste, nudging their partners, husbands, wives, to say: That sounds like you, or, Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?

Whether this sense of audience concord is an exclusively good or bad thing depends in part on what you want from a night at the theatre. Sending 300-odd audience members into the STC’s new bar murmuring and nodding in consonance is one thing; sending them out into the night with a provocation would have been entirely another. I longed to see those couples bicker in the hallway; those parent-child teams stake their claims for their respective beliefs. Never Did Me Any Harm, while touching on some potentially controversial subject matter (corporal punishment, cultural norms of breastfeeding, disabilities) doesn’t really ask the audience to interrogate their positions on such issues. Without doubt or quibble, it’s technically impressive work, with excellent performances all round and elegant and moving choreography from Champion. But, like so many modern parents, it soothes rather than challenges our anxieties.