Main Theatre, Adelaide College of the Arts,
December, 2011.
It’s a given among reviewers that student performances are judged slightly less stringently than professional shows. It’s understood that the purpose of a student show is to provide students with performing experience and a chance to demonstrate their evolving artistry and technical skills; complete mastery is not expected. When it comes to the graduation show, however, the bar needs to be raised. These students need to demonstrate both a degree and a range of technical and performance skills consonant with the expectations of a professional career, and they need to be given the vehicles to enable them to do so.
This year’s graduation performance by the students of the Adelaide College of the Arts started out well enough with a work created on the students by Jonathan Taylor, former artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre and Dean of Dance at the VCA. Heven and Erthe in Lytyl Space is a humorous retelling of the nativity story inspired by the passion plays of the medieval period. The ingenious set by Hannah Cossutta folds out like a giant medieval triptych, with a body-shaped hole that admits players to the scene, and the sound, credited to Kate Mandalov, bizarrely combines medieval religious music with excerpts from the musical Cabaret. Taylor’s quirky approach to the story keeps it fresh: the Angel Gabriel sports pop-up wings, Mary’s belly is a self-inflating balloon, and so forth. The Court of the Immaculate Conception, in which the claims of all the pregnant girls in the town are judged and Mary comes out trumps, and the birth scene itself, in which the midwife’s hand turns to gold, are particularly amusing. Being cast as individual characters requires that the students act, which they mostly do well, and Taylor’s choreography, which mixes contemporary with some more classically inspired jumps and batterie, also stretches them.
Among the opening night cast, Marcus Louend as the Angel was outstanding, with a lovely expansive style and solid classical technique. Nicole Calabrese gave a witty performance as Mary, and Kris Lajumin danced the celebratory dance at the end with precision and gusto.
The second half of the program is given over to Peter Sheedy’s Helter Skelter, also choreographed on the students, but with less satisfactory results. The rather garbled program notes indicate that surrealism and dreams were the work’s starting point, and describe it as an “orchestrated collision of movement styles”. Set to an upbeat soundscape incorporating hits from the 1960s, the piece is an energetic workout consisting of jazz and contemporary moves with lots of rock style posturing and costume changes thrown in. The nine students danced all out - there was no shortage of energy or commitment - but the piece lacks discernible structure and is too long, despite many entertaining moments. What is most troubling though is that it seems to work the students within their comfort zones; it’s questionable whether so much campy posturing allows them to demonstrate the range of artistry needed by a professional dancer.
Having recently reviewed another graduation program that was enormously diverse and challenged the students with a range of styles and techniques, really pushing them to expand both their movement vocabulary and their artistry, I can’t help thinking that a more varied and extensive program would have showcased the AC Arts graduates’ abilities more effectively.
- MAGGIE TONKIN