Australasian Dance Collective
Blue
Playhouse, QPAC
May 14
Any significant anniversary is cause for celebration, but Australasian Dance Collective (ADC), formerly Expressions Dance Company (EDC), pulled out all stops for its 40th, the highlight being the QPAC season of ‘Blue’. The opening night audience was abuzz with a rich tapestry of company members and friends from the early years onwards, including founding Artistic Director Maggi Sietsma AM, all keen to celebrate the milestone.
Artistic Director Amy Hollingsworth chose the old adage of ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’ to frame a program she saw as a celebration of the marriage of the company’s past with its future. The triptych of works chosen, not only fit neatly into this paradigm of old, new and borrowed, but also displayed the dancers’ fine command of three very different movement styles.
Natalie Weir’s When Time Stops, created in 2013 when Artistic Director of EDC, was the ‘something old’ that opened the program. Set within the spiritual context of the legend of ‘the Ferryman’, the transporter of souls across the River Styx, the work’s central character is a woman experiencing flashbacks of memory at the very last moments of her life. This 25-minute excerpt is an evocation rather than a recreation, with snippets pulled from the original to create a much shorter but nevertheless coherent narrative.
Although truncated, with minimal set design elements, the work has lost none of its magic, due mainly to Weir’s skill in expressing the smallest nuance of emotion through movement. The original score by Iain Grandage richly underpinning the work’s expressive line, was again played live on stage by the twelve musicians of Camerata, moving on and off stage in different formations, and becoming integral to the expressive and visual impact of the work.
Riannon McLean repeated her pivotal role of the Woman, having lost none of her powers of interpretation or execution. A mesmerising duet with a muscular Jack Lister as the Ferryman, of fluidly articulated lifts, showed the requisite strength and control. Other duet and solo moments were peppered through the work as memories came and went, with sinuous grounded movement that often fell seamlessly into and away from the floor. Each of the other company artists were notable: Sam Hall, Lilly King, Taiga Kita-Leong, Lily Potger, and Georgia Van Gils.
The ‘new’ work that followed, Melanie Lane’s Glass Teeth, was also stylistically very different. Appealing more to the intellect than the emotions, it is a visually striking piece, exploring the mythologies and architecture of dreamscapes, by making a deep dive into the absurdist terrain of surrealism. Inspiration is drawn from Greek mythology and visual artists like Salvador Dali, whose surrealist art often mimicked the logic of dreams.
Costumes designed by Gail Sorronda contribute absurdity, from the medieval styled conical hats and veils to corseted bodices, and skintight pants, all in black. The distinctive shapes created are thrown into sharp relief against a cyc lit in different vibrant colours (design by Ben Hughes), in an otherwise black box setting.
A bugle, often incorporated into a surrealist context, is played live, a strident call to open the work. Other re-occurring motifs from the realm of dreams are also explored, like the surrealist fascination with hair – in the final moments four very long braids stream from the back of Van Gils head, each controlled from the shadows by a company dancer.
The score by Clark, a mix of the classical and electronic, has an evenly repetitive rhythm, its percussive beat reflected in movement heavy with gesture including flicking of fingers and wrists. Abstractions of ballet shapes and steps like courrus, were also recognisable in the eclectic movement vocabulary, while the expressive use of face by the dancers including both mimed and spoken text, although unintelligible, was compelling.
An excerpt from Hofesh Shechter’sOK In Your Rooms (2007), considered by some to be his breakthrough work, was the ‘something borrowed’ conclusion to the program. Described as a ’visceral exploration of chaos, conflict and human emotion’, and presented as a series of fragmented scenes, this powerful work has the six company dancers plus Rehearsal Director Sam Coren and Pre-Professional student Hayley Corderoy, all in street clothing, seemingly cast adrift in a black box setting.
Lee Curran’s striking lighting design helps create the different scenes, as shafts of overhead light sporadically fragment the gloom revealing one or two dancers, where before there had been eight. It’s a repeated pattern; the dancers always returning to their ordered lines of pulsing movement, often the repeated motif of walking, hunched over on bent knees, hands on thighs.
The rhythm of the very grounded movement is intoxicating – repetitive and relentless – while the evocative score, also by Shechter, amplifies the movement’s intensity as it builds, erupting into a ferocious drumming, before again fading with the movement. The use of unison is also powerful especially in the work’s more strident moments.
Every dancer attacked the work’s challenging physicality with conviction, making the final defiant fist punch in the air both a powerful end to the work, and to what had been a well-curated celebratory program.
- Denise Richardson