Adelaide Festival 2016 -
Atlanta Eke: Body of Work -
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, 10 March –
The Holy Body Tattoo: Monumental –
Festival Theatre, 4 March -
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Nelken –
Adelaide Festival Theatre, 9 March -
ADT: The Beginning of Nature –
WOMADelaide Botanic Park, 12 March -
Thankfully, after last year’s slim pickings, the 2016 Adelaide Festival had a strong dance component. Headlined by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch—returning to Adelaide for the first time in thirty-four years—the program featured two world premieres from Garry Stewart’s ADT, Monumental by reformed Canadian company Holy Body Tattoo, and Body of Work by Australian choreographer Atlanta Eke.
More performance art than dance, Body of Work, a one-woman show performed by Eke, with video projections by Hana Miller and Jacob Perkins, live music by Daniel Jenatsch and lighting by Matthew Adey, was the slightest work on offer. Coming in well short of its advertised running time of an hour, it mainly comprises camera-generated images of Eke’s body projected onto two screens using special effects such as motion capture and time delay.
Eke enters clad in cushions like some kind of sofa monster, which she then discards offstage, reappearing in metallic silver tights and midriff top. Throughout the work she dons glossy fetish boots, then a spaceman hat, smears her face and midriff with white paint, bites into a capsule of blue ink that runs in rivulets down her face and body, with all of these refracted in overlapping images onscreen. Movements lying on her back on a box mimic the weightlessness of space, which, added to her outfit and space hat, seems to suggest the extra-terrestrial, but although the work creates a dreamy mood, there is little thematic or kinetic development for the audience to latch onto.
The Holy Body Tattoo’s Monumental, on the other hand, rammed its theme of the ‘physical anxiety of urban culture’ down the audience’s collective throat. Backed by the ear-splitting sound of post-rock cult band, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, playing behind a scrim at the back of the stage, and choreographed by Noam Gagnon and Dana Gringras, Monumental features nine dancers confined to individual square plinths for the majority of the performance. Starting in stillness, individual twitching and scratching gathers pace until the dancers are stamping out rhythmic gestural patterns in canon. The ever-increasing speed of contemporary life is captured in the movement, and underlined by projections of freeways and wind farms, with text adding another layer of complexity. This part of the work is utterly compelling: the energy and absolute commitment of the dancers and the power of the music combine to tremendous effect.
Once the dancers come down from their plinths and enact pack behaviours, attacking and isolating individuals and acting out collective aggression, the piece loses some of its choreographic originality and could well have been shortened. Nevertheless, this 2005 work remains of the moment, and still speaks powerfully to contemporary urban angst.
Nelken, or Carnations, which Bausch made in 1983, is completely different in tone, the exquisite 3,000 pink carnations covering the stage signalling a gentler take on the state of the human race. Dancers dressed in evening clothes enter carrying chairs, seating themselves around the perimeter of the stage. One by one, they descend into the auditorium, escorting selected audience members outside. Back on stage, a man signs the lyrics of Gershwin’s "The Man I Love", a woman wearing nothing but underpants and a piano accordion wanders through, men dressed in women’s party dresses hop like bunnies through the flowers. A seemingly unrelated series of scenes unfold in which stunt men hurtle themselves from towers of scaffolding, children are scolded by their parents, a stern-voiced man demands passports, the ensemble dances on and under tables, Alsatian dogs appear, individuals brag about their dancing tricks, and so forth.
The work is deeply humorous, with much spoken text but little in the way of actual dancing. The lack of obvious connection between the vignettes invites the audience to create individual meanings. No doubt others made different interpretations, but to my eyes the linking theme was power, as children rehearse domination in their games, men put on power with their suits and lose it again when dressed in women’s clothes, and the passport inspector controls and humiliates his victims. Nelken’s surface beauty belies its serious underpinnings, making it a work to be savoured long after the curtain comes down.
ADT’s second premiere for the festival, The Beginning of Nature, is the second instalment in Garry Stewart’s “Nature Series”, and is markedly different to the first, Habitus, reviewed last week. This work, aptly shown in the idyllic setting of Botanic Park at Adelaide’s world music festival, explores the rhythms of nature: the seasons, tides, migrations, weather, and so forth. Brendan Woithe’s stunning score, played live by Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet, was accompanied by Indigenous vocalists Shauntai Batzke and Vonda Last singing in Kaurna, the Indigenous language of the Adelaide Plains.
Dressed in neutral-toned sleeveless coats, the nine dancers form a succession of patterns in scenes representing death and birth, growth and decay. Some allusions to the natural world are obvious—much use is made of branches and leaves, and there is an almost martial duet in which luminous green sticks are wielded like Kendo swords—while others are more abstract.
This is a powerful work, in which music, movement and design make a coherent whole, and it drew a rapturous reception from the spellbound crowd. A virtual reality app, accessed via Google Cardboard Viewers, featuring three sections of The Beginning of Nature shot in various South Australian locations was also launched on opening night, and plans are apparently afoot to use the work to promote the revival of the Kaurna language, so The Beginning of Nature looks like being the beginning of something big for ADT.
All in all, David Sefton’s last program as director delivered the goods as far as dance is concerned: let’s see what Neil Armfield and Rachel Healey have in store for 2017.
- Maggie Tonkin
Top photo: Nelken by Tony Lewis.
Click on thumbnails for captions. Photos by Tony Lewis except for Body of Work photo by Gregory Lorenzutti.
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