Australian Dance Theatre. 27 Feb 2016
Habitus presents as a thoroughly entertaining, richly comic work of fantastical, thought provoking dimensions.
It delves into the strange way we seem contentedly hostage to a materially constructed ‘natural’ world of consumerism, material comforts and associated rituals and rules unconsciously prioritised over anything else, without paying much attention to the actual nature of real nature.
Choreographer/Director Garry Stewart’s program note announces Habitus as the first in a series of new works falling under the title The Nature Series which will delve into the big issue of the century; how we relate to nature, how we care for the planet.
This long term discussion begins with the domestic world we inhabit.
With remarkable surrealistic finesse marrying Designer Gaelle Mellis’ set and costumes, Damien Cooper’s starkly bold cinematic lighting, and Stewart’s rich anthropologically informed palette of moves, Habitus does a magnificent job focusing on how our ‘natural’ world operates, as opposed to how real nature actually is.
Mellis’ colour scheme to the design operates as a key element in successfully getting complex issues across. It’s all about blue. What’s blue? The sky, water, air.
Habitus begins with hard core blue. Blue, in this production, are all the things that are not natural; manufactured clothes, underwear, shoes, hardback books, furniture and ironing boards. Dancers in Smurf shade blue socks have nothing to do with actual nature. But they make you think about it!
What about green, the other obvious signifier of the natural world, you might ask. It certainly makes an appearance. Before green makes its ultimate impact on the production, Habitus powers right into a magnificent series of taut, mechanistic yet gleefully playful routines tying together things obvious in a manner set to make us think about them again.
What we wear, how we handle clothing, the obsession with working out, the importance of utilitarian things such as ironing boards, couches and especially, books (nature’s trees are despoiled as to create a means to hold and disseminate knowledge and rules of social order) get a thorough going over.
Stewart’s choreography comprises a fast, crystal clear perfect series of ordinary day to day moves hyper realised against the bare space with maximum effect for comedy where required. You wonder when the natural world will fight back. It just doesn’t seem to exist.
Central to the success of the work is the thinking behind the book’s role in Habitus as the ultimate tool of rule over the plainly non-natural world. How books are physically organised, worshiped and exchanged is deftly explored with especial focus on how the book over time since its invention, as opposed to the seasons of nature, has more and more determined nurture of the ‘unnatural’ than nature. Book dances and couch dances are magnificent choreographic creations.
The ADT ensemble have an absolute ball dancing Habitus, not to mention a bit of acting and lines of text linking through the work and especially, fantastic comic work from Thomas Bradley, Thomas Gundry Greenfield, Samantha Hines, Michael Ramsay and Loni-Garnons Williams.
David O’Brien
When: 26 February to 5 March
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Slingsby in association with Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016. 5th Floor Myer Centre (formerly Dazzleland). 27 Feb 2016
Oh, Slingsby, you've done it again! Currently lead by artistic director Andy Packer and executive producer Jodi Glass, the South Australian Slingsby theatre production company has toured numerous works to forty-three cities, including performances on Broadway.
In this world premiere, you meet the King's staff on the ground floor of the shopping palace and are transported in his personal elevator to the workshop - follow the advice you receive after purchasing your ticket through BASS which is come a half-hour earlier. You can't meet a king and present coronation gifts looking like a frump or a hobo!
The King is an extremely pleasant fellow played affably by Tim Overton. Ably assisted by Jacqy Phillips who plays a myriad of characters, and on the eve of the King's coronation, together they tell the tale of the old king's grandson, brought back from poverty and banishment, to be crowned the next day. The young king has ordered the finest robes, scepter and crown for the occasion but three well-illustrated dreams bring a change of heart. The story is of absolute relevance today.
Oscar Wilde's short story - dramatised for the stage by Adelaide's Nicki Bloom - is given the kiss of life through director Andy Packer's application of theatrical magic. Geoff Cobham's lighting is minimalist, playful and inventive; eg. The use of shadow play and hand-held torches. Composer Quincy Grant entices a delightful score from the piano, and you are in the court of the King, in a kingdom of citizen artisans, miners, and tree-fellers, you incorporeally haunt a palace, a hovel and forests, and I haven't yet described the poignant imagery of the dreams. Yet in the opening scenes, the young king is such a nice guy, his avarice for fine things is dulled. This is no Scrooge-like transformation. And the final imagery of transformation was rushed and not well established.
Don't leave sans une programme with the whole story published within. Bravo, Slingsby!
David Grybowski
When: 27 Feb to 19 Mar
Where: 5th Floor Myer Centre (formerly Dazzleland)
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Erth. Norwood Concert Hall. 27 Feb 2016
The kids will love this. I was interested in dinosaurs since I was a young'un - I learned all their names and went to the museum myself on Saturday morning to look at their skeletons. So I loved it. Parents will love it.
Australian designer and creator Scott Wright knows his audience too well and winds them at the beginning of the show to their delight, starting with dinos in nappies and promising to bring out the big dinos later. While the show has been around for some time, what's on offer in the Festival is the version developed for Broadway. You will see the same show that Alicia Keys, Jerry Seinfeld and Sarah Jessica Parker and their kids enjoyed in The Big Apple. Up until that point, Wright's original show was true dinky-di, sporting only Australian dinosaurs, but now the world favourites are included, like triceratops and T.rex.
Wright advocates responsible behaviour around dinosaurs. Useful information is eased in even as the kids squeal in delight. Some lucky kids (very helpful to sit near the front) get on stage to pet the baby critters after some brief instruction useful to dealing with any pet. Lots of quasi-scary and fun audience participation as well. And anyone who has been to Cape Otway Lighthouse will be delighted to confront a couple of emu-size Laeallynasaura that were discovered nearby in Dinosaur Cove.
The engine room of the show is the technology of the puppets, the largest whole creatures are larger than SUVs, and there were two of them. And golly gosh, don't they look real! Their skin, their growl, head and jaw operations and the way the puppeteers manipulate large body movements. They are curious and intelligent. We don't see wild dinosaurs, we see very large pets.
I would have sworn Wright promised a dinosaur that would be capable of eating the seven bales of hay that were on stage in one go, so while a 'five-year old' juvenile T.rex was produced, I thought there would be a big surprise at the end of the show with a giant. No such luck.
Erth's Dinosaur Zoo is the next best thing to being in the Cretaceous, even better, because your toddler would have been the meal, not the master, of these magnificent and skillfully operated avatars.
P.S. See the article on Erth and their show in The Weekend Australian Review February 27-28, 2016.
David Grybowski
When: 27 Feb to 6 Mar
Where: Norwood Concert Hall
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
State Theatre Company, Belvoir and Malthouse Theatre in association with Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty's Theatre. 26 Feb 2016
David Greig is a fulsomely credentialed and amazingly prolific Scottish playwright and dramatist, with works commissioned and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and The National Theatre of Scotland. So why did The Events just leave me feeling glum?
The Events premiered in Edinburgh in 2013 and is set in a small Scottish town, although you will find little of Scotland in the play and it could have been set anywhere. The work is Greig's response to the Norwegian mass murder of two years before. Claire, an Anglican minister, is leading a choir in a plainly staged rehearsal space. Played by Catherine McClements, she is impossibly cheery, chatty and friendly. The choir sings and the energy level is right up there. Claire coaxes a young man - or as the programme refers to him, The Boy - up onto the stage to participate. Thanks to Johnny Carr's performance, the energy evaporates and never really recovers. Besides you know who, Carr is also charged with playing multiple roles - father, friend, politician - who are associated with the gunman, and as Claire interviews all who the gunman knew, she sees the gunman. There he is again as Claire's partner, Katrina, and her counselor. I just see Carr struggling to differentiate these characters, or maybe he wasn't supposed to - I don't know what director Clare Watson required, it's not clear.
Claire is searching for answers, but we already know there aren't any that satisfy. Peter Shaffer provided this exploration much more effectively in Equus in a time when we weren't inundated with mass murders. Bob Geldof wrote about it in I Don't Like Mondays. So the play plods on with a metronomic evenness. A rare bright spot is a scene demonstrating how Claire's obsession is out of control with partner Katrina.
A consistent theme of Greig's work is to foster a connectedness between the characters in spite of huge gulfs. The choir is different every performance but that didn't mean much to me as I'm only seeing the show once, and that was one time too many. Chorus members weren't even given the script until just before walking onstage, so we could have their genuine reactions, but this was a failed device because their wasn't terribly much to react to, and if it was worth watching, I wasn't looking at the choir. The few lines chorus members had were woodenly read as they just got the script and they're not actors anyways. Unlike a Greek chorus.
After seeing Go Down, Moses the night before, the production values were utterly plain. Mostly lit by the bright lights one would find in a gym, Claire was busy putting chairs out and restacking them for no dramatic worth. The Boy annoyingly kept returning to the coffee urn set stage left.
In the end, evil is banal, like this play and production.
David Grybowski
When: 25 Feb to 5 Mar
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Presented by Michael Burgos. Tuxedo Cat. 25 Feb 2016.
As an alumni of the prestigious French clown school École Philippe Gaulier, Michael Burgos is in the same company as Sacha Baron Cohen, Emma Thompson, and Helena Bonham Carter. It is therefore no surprise that Burgos can make you laugh heartily with a gesture, a look, a word.
His one man show, The Eulogy, is set in a funeral home at which the funeral of his friend Thomas is underway. Thomas was morbidly obese and died from the diseases of excess that come from a lifetime of absolute gluttony. Thomas was the object of ridicule and snide remarks, and at his funeral there is a veritable zoo of weird and diverse ‘friends’ and acquaintances who clamor to offer eulogies. Burgos plays them all and successfully gives them all highly individual personas that scream out for attention and likely rival Thomas’s ability to draw attention to himself.
Burgos is captivating as he plays everything from a pall bearer to a child whose first experience of death was the demise of his goldfish, to a guilty cake-stealing child caught with his mouth stuffed full of chocolate, to a fire-and-brimstone evangelical preacher from the deep South, to a ballerina with an unhealthy penchant for fire, and others I can no longer remember.
Each characterisation is compelling, and at times quite touching despite the grotesqueness of many of the characters.
At the end of his opening night, which was sold out, he offered each member of the audience a delicious cupcake – chocolate of course! – on their way out of the almost-stiflingly hot venue (get some air conditioners!).
Funerals are often solemn affairs, but not this one. It was a hoot!
Kym Clayton
When: 25 Feb to 14 Mar
Where: The Tuxedo Cat
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au