• Zoe Dunwoodie in Epoch by Erin Fowler. Photo: Tony Lewis.
    Zoe Dunwoodie in Epoch by Erin Fowler. Photo: Tony Lewis.
  • Felix Sampson & Thomas Fonua in Fonua's The Village. Photo: Tony Lewis.
    Felix Sampson & Thomas Fonua in Fonua's The Village. Photo: Tony Lewis.
  • Thomas Fonua, Ellya Sam, Felix Sampson & Zoe Dunwoodie in Matte Roffe's WOOLF! Photo: Tony Lewis.
    Thomas Fonua, Ellya Sam, Felix Sampson & Zoe Dunwoodie in Matte Roffe's WOOLF! Photo: Tony Lewis.
  • Kimball Wong, Thomas Fonua, Zoe Dunwoodie, Ellya Sam & Matte Roffe in Lina Limosani's One's Wicked Ways. Photo: Tony Lewis.
    Kimball Wong, Thomas Fonua, Zoe Dunwoodie, Ellya Sam & Matte Roffe in Lina Limosani's One's Wicked Ways. Photo: Tony Lewis.
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Australian Dance Theatre: “Ignition: History”
ADT July 9 2016 AC Arts

After a five year recess, ADT has revived "Ignition", its annual season devoted to the development of choreographic talent. As in past seasons, artistic director Garry Stewart has given the choreographers a theme to work with, this year’s being ‘history’. The five works on offer engage with this theme in very different ways, with three referencing specific historical moments, and two reflecting on the past in more abstract terms.

Kicking off is ADT dancer Matte Roffe’s WOOLF!, a playful take on the classic film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which explores the marital dramas of two couples over one drunken evening. After an introduction, delivered in an American accent by Kimball Wong, the four characters play out their mutual recriminations, self-hatred, and infidelities in front of a revolving mirror, lip-synching, speaking and dancing at a relentless pace. It’s a knowingly melodramatic and very entertaining opener that reflects the fraught gender relations of the 1950s.

The six dancers in Katrina Lazaroff’s Caught in Past Tense also make use of spoken text, but in this case not to express their angst but rather to depict the impossibility of expressing themselves at all, and of recounting the past. Dressed in 1940s and ‘50s brown and yellow-toned day wear, they stutter and stammer and get tangled up in attempts to articulate past events, dancing jerkily on and around a variety of props. This is a fine although short piece of dance theatre.

In contrast, Epoch, by local independent choreographer Erin Fowler, is a pure dance work. Garbed in black long pants and long-sleeved tops, the six dancers stand upstage in dim side-lighting, before each dances downstage in individual corridors of light. Their solos, using subtle upper-body movements, gradually segue into three duets, before all return to the rear of the stage, lifting their arms in unison. Epoch builds a mysterious and intriguing atmosphere, and is worthy of further development.

Thomas Fonua’s The Village is an excerpt from his full-length work, MALAGA, an exploration of the infamous nineteenth-century ‘Human Zoos’, in which indigenous peoples were toured around Europe, exhibited like animals in zoo-like settings. Accompanied by a voice-over by his Samoan grandfather, through anguished solos, duets and ensemble work, Fonua depicts the despair of Pacific Islanders who—often after being tricked or even kidnapped—were forced to suffer this degradation. As with another very different excerpt presented at a previous ADT studio showing, this work is a powerful indictment of the inhumanity of colonialism: I hope we will be able to see MALAGA in its entirety soon.

Lina Limosani’s thirty-minute work, One’s Wicked Ways, depicts the overthrow of a bunch of narcissistic, debauched aristocrats by a commoner, and is obviously loosely based on the French Revolution. Dressed in white hoop petticoats, breeches and coats, and wearing oversized eighteenth-century wigs and whiteface, the aristocrats indulge alternately in power-plays, simulated sex, and silly games. Limosani keeps the slapstick sharp, and subtly manages the transition to a more sombre mood when the commoner attempts to change the system, first through political rhetoric in a multi-lingual garble, then through physical resistance culminating in violence. After being hung and tortured by the aristocrats, he kills them all, but the ending is somewhat ambiguous, with the victor assuming a seemingly dictatorial stance. One’s Wicked Ways is funny and serious and highly engaging, Limosani’s deft timing and acute sense of theatre making it clear why she was awarded the 2015 Ausdance Peggy van Praagh Choreographic Fellowship.

A number of the nation’s foremost independent choreographers made their first works for Ignition, including Antony Hamilton, Anton, Tanja Liedtke, Larissa McGowan and Christina Chan, as well as New Zealand's Ross McCormick, so its return with such a strong program is cause for celebration. Long may it continue!

Maggie Tonkin

 

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