Meryl Tankard. Adelaide Festival Centre. Dunstan Playhouse. 20 Aug 2014
Meryl Tankard is best known to Adelaide audiences for her works as Creative Director of the Australian Dance Theatre in the 1990s. During this time, she devised such memorable dances as Furioso, Aurora and Possessed. I still have the haunting Aurora poster of a little girl dressed in a fairy costume holding a wand hanging on my wall. Yet Adelaide was but a stop in a long, productive and awarded international career propelled by a peripatetic life as mobile as her childhood as an army brat (born in Darwin, her father was in the RAAF).
The Oracle is a love letter to Paul White and has been touring since 2009 - I suppose Tankard was in no rush to bring it to Adelaide. White has had a no less, albeit shorter, career performing, devising, choreographing and collaborating in dance, and has rubbed up against Tankard in the past. Set somewhat to Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, White is the sole performer in Tankard's version of this famous ballet and orchestral piece first performed in Paris in 1913 by the Ballets Russes and choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky.
Armed as I was with only the knowledge that the original 1913 production was about - briefly, as the title suggests - the rites of passage with a sinister sacrificial dance thrown in, and that this production is entitled The Oracle, I could make no sensible interpretation of the narrative except my own imprint. And it didn't matter because...
...Paul White is a force of nature. Tankard, with her designers, Régis Lansac and Ben Hughes, chose a dark stage on which to highlight every sinew of White's impressive physique. Or as my father would say, "He's built like a brick shit house." And there was a lot on show. When he wasn't simply in his underdaks, he wore nothing whatsoever. His ample strength contributed to a gymnastic performance, his body moving fluidly over the music's complexity, athletics convolved with ballet with modern dance. Tankard often deliberately slowed the action so your eyes may feast.
She also made you wait. The show opened with a kaleidoscope moving image of Paul White's appendages set to various sounds and chords, and the audience eagerly anticipated the real thing.
The Oracle is an entrancing anatomical celebration of the body beautiful, gracefully in perpetual motion.
David Grybowski
When: 20 to 23 Aug
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
