Australian Dance Theatre. Adelaide College of the Arts. 9 Jul 2016
History, time, and the flow of human obsessions are given the most thoroughly intelligent and fun-packed going over by choreographers Matte Roffe, Katrina Lazaroffe, Erin Fowler, Thomas Fonua and Lina Limosani.
Ignition, in its return to the ADT dance calendar, is just as exciting and valuable a means of showing off the choreographic caliber within the company, as it was always a means of belting out new ideas to think on.
Roffe’s Woolf! strips down Edward Albee’s 1962 play into 15 minutes of blazing choreography, managing to encapsulate gesturally all the restrained social and political norms of ‘50s relationships and of its two academic couples, the younger and older one.
Using a wall mirror on wheels allows this piece to go for speed, for hiding mysteries, revealing desire unburdened as it turns again and again. It’s full on stuff, injected with a 21st Century edge of awareness and urgency hinted at in the brilliant cheer leader rap delivered earlier in the work, “who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf?!”
Lazaroffe’s Caught in Past Tense really does physicalise that sense we’ve all had of being ‘stuck’ in past actions or words and trying to escape them. What makes it really work, beyond the supremely sharp choreography, is that ‘bang’ moment. That invisible, thousandth-of-a-microsecond moment, dividing what you did or said from the next moment you’re meant to do or say something else, but repeat yourself instead.
The dancers are constantly expressing this series of wildly frustrating moments that don’t move on properly at wonderfully graduated speed; be it stuffing a speech up, repacking a case that’s fallen open, asking a question of someone. There seems no escape from the ‘past’.
Fowler’s Epoch, in choreography and design, takes the most minimalist approach to that grand span of history the word epoch encompasses.
The lighting’s everything. White on black, muted shadows revealing a gently evolving series of gestures and acts we associate with historic moments of success and failure throughout history.
Fowler attempts to simultaneously show these things as separate to a specific ‘time’ as much as they are also a continuum ever unfolding. As separate white columns dividing dancers and actions slowly blend into a shared circle, separate gestures become points of interaction.
Fonua’s The Village is an excerpt of his MALAGA, performed at Tempo Dance Festival, New Zealand, in 2015.
Colonialism in history is dealt with to extraordinary effect in this piece. Fonua speaks of the top down power of colonisation, the human zoo, in his choreographer’s note.
The dancers spend much of the time close to the ground, on their knees.
They function in tightly organised physical subservience which suppresses everything of them; colour and character of their native dress, natural expressiveness of the body and interaction with others. They are very much on show, living as orchestrated beings, not human beings.
Yet within this suppression, Fonua realises a strength and a vibrancy in balance against the confinement enforced. With supreme grace, dancers glide across the floor with sweeping movements at the knees, colonisation cannot totally break down the cultural life that exists.
Limosani’s One’s Wicked Ways, a full length work commissioned for this season of Ignition, brilliantly gathers all the thematic strands of the four works preceding it in a fantastic, gloriously pleasing way.
One’s Wicked Ways liberates in dance the full emotive and dark comic force found in Frances’s greatest writers of farce, Moliere. There are many actors who would jealously wish they could dance, as to perform Limosani’s creation, it’s so good.
The social, moral and political decadence of Moliere’s time has many parallels with the behaviour of 21st Century elites. Complete debauchery, mockery of moral institutions, corruption of public institutions, and lip service paid to the law as it suits.
It’s a wild romp dressed in regal white.
With precise timing, Limosani has the ensemble play out wicked thrills and spills of excess to thralls of tittering laughter from the debauchees as they flit from one naughty act to the next. The appearance of the purple robed Cardinal/nobleman, the bogeyman of the self serving elite, sets up Limosani’s piece for its sharpest commentary. As he is seduced and flayed to near nothing, so he also rises in attack.
The playful choreography of debauchery gives way to a searing fury of symbolised violence. Limosani’s careful work becomes a brilliant exploration of two sides of history’s coin. Oppression, and being oppressed.
David O’Brien
When: 9 to 16 July
Where: Adelaide College of the Arts, Main Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
