With the sold-out season of BalletLab’s Aviary. A Suite for the Bird, Phillip Adams reaffirms his status not just as an edgy choreographer but a major artist who – always – transgresses the boundaries of his form, pushing beyond comfort and often beyond any conventional point of reference. That can be very demanding on his audience, but over his career Adams has built up a dedicated following. Magnificent (and yes, divisive) as they are, BalletLab works are never populist, and Aviary is one of Adams’ most complex and perhaps most personal ballets.
For Adams and his company recent months have been marked with success. Hundreds were turned away, unable to be seated, at his Miracle trilogy staged at MONA-FOMA over summer; the company received Key Emerging Organisation status from the Australia Council; and Aviary tickets were unobtainable almost immediately after going on sale at this year’s Melbourne Festival.
But Aviary has had a long development, starting during a period when things were not so rosy, which might be why the work is so highly self-referential, or seems at times to be a long mediation on the attritions of creating major works on shoe-string budgets. There is, as always, a signature flamboyance – Adam’s bird as Dandy is front and centre, and Aviary as a theatrical work is visually stunning. But there is also sometimes an undertone of anxiety and inwardness, of deep reflection. It is perhaps no accident that BalletLab describes Aviary as a work for the caged bird.
Still, if you came to Aviary without knowing the back-story you would never guess.
The production value of Phillip Adams’ Suite is exceptionally refined and includes designs by internationally renowned fashion designer Toni Maticevski, who has costumed the Suite in forms that are as subtle in their refinement as they are visually beautiful. Milliner Richard Nylon provided visions in feather that are more sculptures than adornments – and many in the audience recoiled at the risks these masterworks endured in the sometimes brutally physical dance.
Aviary began as a development in conjunction with Australian Ballet in 2009 and the first act captures that generative moment with Adams’ use of French composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux (1958). This act (Les oiseaux en cage) most fully reflects Adams’ classical training and sometimes electrifying collision with contemporary dance methods. In near monochrome tones played against Gavin Brown’s immense and intricate bird wing backdrop, with sheets of the score distributed on the floor and sound artist David Franzke’s remix of bird songs playing at high volume, the dancers – resplendent in plumage and high fashion – enact the transformation of an inspiration into art, the process of the Bird transformed into Ballet. The dancers – Luke George, Brooke Stamp, Rennie McDougall, Daniel Jaber, Peter A. B. Wilson, Joanne White (and Adams himself) – are simply exceptional in their immersion, poise and characterisations. This first act has been the uniform hit of the season.
The second act (Le coq dandy) in contrast has split audiences right down the middle. Conceived in its early development as an articulation of the Dandy, it takes inspirations from Regency England, Beau Brummell, Sebastian Horsley, H.H. Munro’s short stories and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. That can help explain the stylised sentry boxes and the military garb. But you’ll have to allow 80’s disco, Gilbert & George and Andy Warhol into the mix to get a grip on the hyper-chromatic coloured grids that were projected in ever-evolving patterns on the dance floor, each with a half-face portrait of a beared or moustached man. This is also the act where Adams’ own dance practise is most on show.
Not everyone liked (and a few disparaged) his white plumed disco cape but you have to admire his guts – and he is still in great shape. Merce Cunningham (d. 2009) and Robert Helpmann (d. 1986) danced almost to the day they died and let’s hope Adams’ return to the stage gives other senior dancers the courage to dance again too. Lighting designer Benjamin Cisterne’s artistry also made this act memorable.
Adams uses a generative process of intense, sometimes exhausting improvisational collaboration with his remarkable dancers. The concluding act, another audience divider, unfolds with Adams in a surreal double peaked hat (picking up two other subtle costume references to Mickey Mouse), hurling armfuls of freshly cut foliage onto the stage against architect Mathew Bird’s laboriously created shimmering backdrop (3000 individual cuts and folds). Often sitting at a prepared piano (Cunnigham/Cage) and entitled Paradis, it is as if Adams’ imagination is conjured into dance in real time.
In reality this act is perhaps the most demanding as the dancers literally have to generate it afresh every performance amongst the strewn debris of leaves and twigs. At almost half an hour in duration you just have to let yourself slip into this one, and if you do the effect is hypnotic.
Overall, Aviary is a work in archetypal BalletLab style that challenges as much as it delivers. Love him or hate him, Phillip Adams is a game-changing pace-setter in contemporary dance.
Rating: Three and a half stars
Aviary: A Suite for the Bird
(Les oiseaux en cage; Le coq dandy; Paradis)
Direction and Choreography: Phillip Adams
Performed by: Phillip Adams, Luke George, Daniel Jaber, Rennie McDougall, Brooke Stamp, Joanne White, Peter A B Wilson
Costume Design: Toni Maticevski
Millinery Design: Richard Nylon
Composition: J David Franzke and Phillip Adams; Part 3 Percussion by Geoffrey Hales
Set Design: Phillip Adams
Nest Design: Matthew Bird, Architect
Curtain Design: Gavin Brown
Lighting Design: Benjamin Cisterne; Design Assistant: Matthew Adey
Production Management: Tom Webster for trafficlight
Producer: Amelia Bartak
World Premiere season
Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall
Wed 19 – Sun 23 Oct 2011
Melbourne Festival
October 6 – 22
