The setting sun sinks beneath the shimmering sea, beautifully projected on a long screen (a central element of Matthew Adey’s sparse, elegant production design) above the opposite seating banks as audiences walk into the Odeon in Norwood: a poignant and potent reminder that a new dawn follows even the darkest day.
Behind us and above us, visible to the audience on the opposite side of the dance floor, is an accompanying video displaying the hills encircling Adelaide to the east.
Eastern hills, western ocean. This is Kaurna Yerta, the video reveals (reflecting the primary law of visual storytelling: show, don’t tell); this is Kaurna County. Always was, always will be.
The audience for A Quiet Language, the 60th anniversary production of Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) are seated in traverse, as if preparing to engage those seated opposite us, across the off-white dance floor (which initially seems like an uncrossable gulf, but which is soon crossed easily, its audiences stitched together by the talented ADT ensemble) in discussion and debate.
Hopefully, it will be a respectful, measured debate, unlike the vitriol unleashed by the 2017 Marriage Equality postal survey, and more savagely – and more recently – by the 2023 Referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Though with a Federal Election expected to be called shortly, such hopes may be in vain.
For ADT to “have survived and thrived” for 60 years is “testament to the power of the art form, dance, the power of communication and the power of the body as the tool for storytelling and connecting us all to something larger than ourselves,” Wiradjuri man Daniel Riley, the company’s current Artistic Director, writes in his director’s notes for A Quiet Language – ADT’s production celebrating this diamond anniversary.
Diamonds are traditionally believed to be the hardest substance on Earth. They are also precious, a value usually expressed monetarily – but diamonds are also beautiful, an aesthetic and cultural conundrum that possibly sits at the heart of ADT’s diamond anniversary production.
Riley is the sixth AD of ADT over the company’s six decades to date, and – so far – its only First Nations Artistic Director. He describes himself as being “deeply connected to dance as the oldest form of storytelling” in his director’s notes for the production.
“I believe that dance can create and celebrate community. It can define identity and ensure stories and ideas endure changes of governments, of funding, of artistic leadership, of world events and political upheaval. Contemporary dance can navigate the social, cultural and political complexities of our time. It can connect us to each other and to place, it opens a door to an instinctual connection that is beyond words. It is a quiet language,” Riley writes.
In A Quiet Language, this deep connection Riley and the other artists feel, is conveyed through body percussion, expressing tenderness, care and love; through floor work, conveying a spiritual connection to County; in a dynamic movement vocabulary that embraces everything from the Black Power/human rights salute seen at the Mexico Olympics in 1968 (a tumultuous year globally that almost changed the world, when ‘resistance became a way of existence’ for many, only to be brutally quashed by an international ‘increase in repression’) and dynamic leaps, leg lifts, body swings and swaying, as well as elegiac movements evoking trauma and showing the hope of collective recovery, and so much more.
A Quiet Language is, despite its name, far from quiet. Its score, created live by the grounded and grounding Adelaidean multi-instrumentalist, Adam Page (whose music grew organically from his immersion in the ADT studio as A Quiet Language was being collectively developed, and which incudes richly evocative vocals, electronic looping and layering, experimental saxophone-playing and more) and the five dancers themselves shout, scream, sob, wail, ululate and celebrate.
Recalling the worst times of the COVID era, their cries are sometimes muffled in the crooks of their elbows. Their anguish – embodied in an exquisitely painful solo by Zoe Wozniak, which transcends suffering to become great art – is silenced, choked and muffled, though ultimately comforted by music. Their celebrations are bellowed, joyously: “Let’s go!”
Read: Theatre review: Shellshocked, Holden Street Theatres, Adelaide Fringe Festival
In some sequences, such as when a dancer sonorously intones every year of ADT’s activity since its inception, A Quiet Language is hypnotic, almost liturgical. Simultaneously, history passes by in a blur of names – seemingly listing every dancer and Artistic Director to have performed with the company since its foundation in 1965 by the visionary dance rebel, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman OAM.
Dalman spent time with the company during the development of the work, helping the ensemble understand the context and vocabulary of her work or, as Riley tells this writer, helping the company make “something that was celebratory, but that also echos the past, but is also, really fiercely, looking forward to the future”.
The arts establishment “called my dance ugly in the beginning but that made me more determined to keep going,” Elizabeth (Liz to her friends, such as Riley, for whom she is a mentor and respected elder) explained in a recent insightful and detailed profile in InDaily.
That phrase, ‘ugly dance’ is repeated late in proceedings in Adey’s digital design, alongside other telling phrases that evoke ADT’s history and profound influence over 60 years on Kaurna Country and the lands of other nations across this nation and beyond: ‘raw – cosmos – radical dance – radical joy’.
A Quiet Language is radical dance and radical joy personified, though it is also dense, at rare moments almost challengingly so, a sign perhaps that future iterations need just a little more time to breathe. It promises – it embodies – exactly what the Voice to Parliament and the Uluru Statement from the Heart offered previously, before that promise was snatched brutally and divisively away.
A Quiet Language promises hope. It promises joy. It embodies two hands, Blak and White, clasped in friendship and finding common ground as we dance together into a shared and hopeful future.
A Quiet Language
An Australian Dance Theatre production presented in association with Adelaide Festival
Director/Concept: Daniel Riley
Choreography: Daniel Riley and ADT Company Artists
Co-Choreographer/Artistic Associate: Brianna Kell
Creative Collaborator: Elizabeth Cameron Dalman OAM
Production Design: Matthew Adey
Lighting Associate: Mark Oakley
Composer and Musician: Adam Page
Costume Design: Ailsa Patterson
Dramaturg: Alexis West
Participant Observer: Dr Cheryl Stock AM
Researcher: Dr Maggie Tonkin
Developed with ADT dancers Sebastian Geilings, Yilin Kong, Zachary Lopez, Karra Nam, Patrick O’Luanaigh and Zoe Wozniak
Performers in world premiere season: Sebastian Geilings, Yilin Kong, Zachary Lopez, Patrick O’Luanaigh and Zoe Wozniak
The Odeon, Norwood
Running time: Approximately 65 minutes
Tickets: Season fully booked
26 February to 7 March 2025
The writer visited Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide Festival.
An interview with Daniel Riley about ADT’s 60-year history and the accompanying exhibition, After Images, which documents those decades, will be published soon on ArtsHub.
