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
