Australian Dance Theatre. Adelaide College of The Arts. 5 Oct 2016
The art of going places no one expected of him is becoming the spectacular norm for Australian Dance Theatre’s Garry Stewart. We were promised a work which would explore the objectification of the human body in art. We got that, and a whole lot more!
Objekt is a grand scale work in which Choreographer/Set Designer Stewart, Lighting Designer Mark Pennington and Costume Designer Lucia Vonchein have designed, built on, painted and robed the ensemble with the same power a choreographer choreographs moves on them.
The visual impact of Objekt is immense, all the more so because Stewart’s choreography daringly deals with the human body as it is seen or imagined in our contemporary digital world, looking back to the past ever so briefly, to what we call naturalism.
Pink strobe lines on the floor reference the iconic film Tron, as do Vonchein’s skin tight head to toe pink costumes with inverted blue triangles. The human as a digitised avatar, a functional cog in a machine world of the imagination. Objekt builds a resolutely mechanistic, functional environment in which touches of blood, skin and bone humanity manage to flare ever so briefly into existence.
Stewart’s sharp, angular, moment to moment choreography blended with rich swathes of sweeping turns and gracious tableaux never loses you. The sense of deep conflict Objekt builds between ‘man is machine’ and ‘man is human’ is ever present. In so many ways, Objekt is a contemporary dance realisation of Germany’s pioneer electronic artists, Kraftwerk, whose whole artistic raison d’ê tere is exploring the unity of man and machine. I can’t stop thinking of their We Are The Robots.
David O’Brien
When: 5 to 8 Oct
Where: Main Theatre, Adelaide College of The Arts
Bookings: trybooking.com
