ADT's 'G'
Wonderland Ballroom
1 March

Utilising a full contingent of eleven dancers for their performance of 'G', Garry Stewart's interpretive dance piece for the Australian Dance Theatre promises to be something of a return to the desconstructionist style in modern dance which Stewart introduced to Adelaide audiences with his work 'Bird Brain', an homage to the classic ballet 'Swan Lake'. Except in this case it's his take on 'Giselle', complete with ciphers and code phrases to indicate fragments of a narrative, set into a contemporary dance framework.

"I suppose there is a trajectory to my work," allows Stewart, who suggests this work, which premieres for this Festival Of The Arts, is akin to his treatment of 'Birdbrain'.

"It's informed by my previous works, like 'Birdbrain' it's a deconstruction of a classic. Now Giselle is a fairly obvious corollary, and so it's always really interesting working with preexisting text. What I've found to be the greatest challenge, and it usually seems the case, is finding a way of reinterpreting material which is 150 years old.

"Today we're playing with some new ideas - we've got these LED screens we're working with, and there's this thought of having ideas satelliting around about the work itself, so that the audience is engaged in the text itself," he tells me.

In applying the term 'deconstruction' I probe whether the term has greater significance for Stewart, whether it means more than simply stripping something down to its constituent parts and putting it back together - differently. My bias is clear, at least, the exercise sometimes appears little more than an intellectual one.

"It fractures the narrative, so rather than having unity it represents a number of different readings," he points out. "The entry point for my work is the energetic and visceral pulsating aspect of the work."

This, at least, is the ADT with which we've all become familiar, a robust and muscular company who seem unafraid to tackle all and any dance styles, and to incorporate other forms of movement into their work... hip hop, acrobatics, martial arts.

Stewart is plainly thrilled to have signed up a couple of new dancers who fit his bill in terms of impact within the company, having gone on something of a quest looking for new talent. He mentions that when he held a national audition last year he "couldn't quite find what I was looking for", which I interpreted as suggesting that he was disenchanted with the quality of the dancers he saw.

"No, not at all. Dancers don't always have what we're looking for. But I was lucky when I held an audition in London and we've signed up two dancers who have now joined the company... though we had to sort out a visa for one of them."

Performing 'G' will then mark the debut ADT performances for both Kialea-Nadine Williams and Kimble Wong. "They're what we always need; Kialea is a trained gymnast, and they're both incredible all-rounders, very charismatic," enthuses Stewart, who is clearly thrilled to have the company up to full strength.

"It doesn't have a huge impact in terms of changing the choreography, and it isn't going to change the work that much, but it's great having new energy like them in the room."

Alex Wheaton


ADT's 'G' opens at the studios (Wonderland Ballroom, Belair Road) on Sat 1 March as part of the Festival Of Arts