Adelaide Festival -
Australian Dance Theatre: Habitus –
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, 26 February -
Habitus marks a new direction in Garry Stewart’s work. In the program notes, Stewart writes that it is the first of a series of connected works that ADT will be making under the title, “The Nature Series”, which will explore our relationship with the natural world. The company is presenting another new work in this series, The Beginning of Nature, at Womadelaide in a fortnight’s time. For the most part, Habitus reflects on our unthinking relationship with domestic objects, rather than with nature directly, but it references broader environmental themes in monologues about planned obsolescence, and in the last section of the work.
Habitus opens with a male dancer, superbly played by Matte Roffe, opening a package that drops from the flies. He rips off successive layers of paper in growing frustration, before finally retrieving an electric blue garment, which he proceeds to model in ever more absurd poses. This motif is shortly repeated as all nine dancers dress themselves in clothes dropped from on high in brown paper packages. This segues into sections that examine—in surrealistic fashion—how we share our domestic space with various items, including sofas, books, ironing boards, chairs and tables. The choreography, which is co-credited to Larissa McGowan and the dancers, is fast, athletic and unfailingly inventive, and the dancers themselves were uniformly extraordinary. Stewart’s witty text, in the form of a series of short monologues, was very well delivered, especially by Zöe Dunwoodie and Thomas Fonua.
Each section exploits the usual uses we make of a given object, and then takes it into the realm of the surreal. In the sofa section, amusing monologues about the humdrum events of our lives that take place on the sofa are followed by fast-paced sequences in which the dancers hurl themselves on and off three sofas, then configure them in various ways whilst executing a series of increasingly hazardous tumbles. Matte Roffe was spectacular in this section, with his fluid yet explosive tumbles and dives. A group of dancers lifts a sofa from the horizontal to the vertical plane and vice versa, whilst one dancer maintains his place on it, seemingly oblivious.
The ironing board section is particularly engaging, with the manipulation of the scissor-like boards mirrored by the manipulation of a dancer’s body. Here Lonii Garnons-Williams’s powerful athleticism was impressive, as she morphed into a mechanized doll, like some postmodern Coppélia.
In the book section, books are read but also stacked, made the objects of courtly Baroque dance sequences, walked on, exchanged and eventually thrown in an almighty book fight - a literalisation of throwing the book at someone, perhaps? However, while there is much to enjoy here, it goes on too long.
The final section shifts into a completely different register, with a giant drape covering the piles of furniture and indeed the whole stage, now bathed in green light. The dancers, wearing leafy green neckpieces, have a softer movement palette. This section seems to indicate the reclamation of human ‘stuff’ by nature, and closes with a monologue about planned obsolescence and the persistence of the material world after our individual deaths, powerfully voiced by Fonua. Whilst in an abstract sense this links to what has gone before, the relationships between our reliance on domestic objects, mindless consumerism and the power of nature need to be articulated more clearly to make this gel with the rest of the work.
However, with stunning lighting by Damien Cooper that makes very effective use of down spots, and Gaelle Mellis’s crisp costumes that feature almost incandescent shades of blue and turquoise, the work looks gorgeous. Brendan Woithe’s score, which mixes Baroque music with a soundscape of wind, water and ticking clocks, is also terrific. Habitus, although slightly overlong, nevertheless takes ADT on a deeply interesting new trajectory.
Maggie Tonkin
Habitus plays Adelaide Festival until March 5.
All photos by Chris Herzfeld – Camlight Productions. Click on thumbnails for captions.