Jessie McKinlay. The Adina Treasury Apartments. 5 Mar 16
The Isabetta Project is based on a 14th Century tale by mediaeval writer and Italian renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio. While production notes don’t specify the story, the production’s content points towards Lisabetta and the Pot of Basil (1351) from his The Decameron as being the inspiration. This tale recounts the tragic love affair between Lisabetta and her lover, Lorenzo.
Choreographer Jessie McKinlay spell-binds the limited size audience with a remarkably intimate, emotionally poetic and deeply personal, rarefied experience.
The Isabetta Project takes place within the tunnels of the Adina Treasury Apartments, providing a perfect, stripped back backdrop suggesting ancient places, in which equally ancient rituals of courtship and emotion unfold. As the production unfolds the audience takes a journey through four rooms; four different stages of a relationship.
Dancers Madeline Edwards and Samuel Harnett-Welk execute choreography of rich light and dark emotion with a firm, formally expressed, tenderness. McKinlay successfully fuses elements of mediaeval dance and contemporary gesture in the long tunnel-like first room in such a way as to imitate the framing of figures in art of mediaeval times. The mood is light, joyous, and emotionally passionate. Delicate moments of piano tingle over phrases of movement.
This is continued in the next room, in which the couple dance behind two separate wreaths of basil on the floor, white hand cloths, a pot of rose petal filled water, and two glass containers of chocolates. Being close to such a personal, ceremonial moment is special. Like a marriage ceremony in which vows are spoken in motion, brought to union and sanctified by the slapping of handfuls of basil on the body, filling the air with such a clean, sweet scent of seeming holiness.
In the context of Boccaccio’s tale, this particular phrase is lucid in its beauty and a remarkable expression of the greater symbolism within it.
At the moment the relationship fractures and changes, so does the accent of the choreography. In a small dark room, floor covered with oranges, Edwards intently reaches for Harnett-Welk, his back to her, but he does not respond. She works the floor in emotional pain, her legs slash the air with concerted effort, and she sweeps in loss, until both dancers draw the audience to the final room, where the darkness of loss becomes fully real.
The Isabetta Project is a magnificent achievement from such a young choreographer. It is a richly inventive contemporary work greatly powered by deeply literate, emotionally open comprehension of the mediaeval world.
David O’Brien
When: 29 Feb to 7 March
Where: Adina Apartment Hotel Adelaide Treasury
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
