2020 promises to be an exciting year for Australian Dance Theatre (ADT).
The company’s performance program kicks off in March at Adelaide Festival with a season of Italian director Romeo Castellucci’s Requiem. Taking its name from the Mozart score for which it is named, Requiem recently made its world premiere in France. ADT will work with Castellucci, British conductor Rory McDonald and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra to present this work.
During April and May ADT will take The Beginning of Nature on a return tour of Europe, travelling to Switzerland, Italy and Germany.
2020 will see ADT collaborate with Western Australia’s flagship contemporary dance company Co:3 Australia to remount Objekt, by ADT director Garry Stewart. First presented in Australia in 2016, Objekt examines the objectification of humans, in particular the idea that by viewing someone else as "the other", we cease to recognise their humanity. Objekt will be performed at the State Theatre Centre of WA in June and Adelaide’s Dunstan Playhouse in June/July.
Next on the agenda will be the presentation of Of all things, by independent South Australian choreographer Alison Currie, at The Odeon. Commissioned by ADT, this work examines the way in which The Odeon’s architecture connects with the dancers performing in it.
Alongside ADT’s performance program, the company will be continuing development of Stewart’s next major work, Supernature. Referencing ideas on transhumanism as a springboard into new mythologies on the potential future of the species, the work decentres the stability of the Vitruvian man and our received understanding of "human" by collapsing the divide between the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic. It raises questions about fundamental aspects of our existence - our artificiality, our “animalness”, and our relationship with the environment, blurring the boundaries between the real and the surreal.
Stewart will also participate in the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres. His short film The Circadian Cycle, which charts the cycle of a day in nature using the dancing body as a metaphor for the morphologies and behaviours of creatures in nature, will be presented at various film festivals and public showings.
For more information about ADT’s 2020 program head to adt.org.au
Pictured top: Zoe Wozniak, Harrison Elliott, Christopher Mills, Matte Roffe and Kimball Wong in 'Supernature'. Photo: Sam Roberts Photography.