Word: stewart
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Seven years ago the stage was set for the premiere of Birdbrain, choreographer Garry Stewart's first work for Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide. The new artistic director had opted for a contemporary version of Swan Lake, and when a video screen on stage displayed the word begin, nothing could have prepared the audience for the dance explosion that ensued as the worlds of ballet and techno music collided. Stewart's dancers deconstructed the story of Prince Siegfried and his dying swan Odette in T shirts wittily printed with words such as doom, lust, sieg and fried. But more amazing...
...classic of contemporary dance, catapulting the company onto the world stage, including the hallowed Th??tre de la Ville in Paris, where last year ADT became the first Australian troupe invited to perform. "Dance in Europe had been dominated by very conceptual work that was physically very minimalist," explains Stewart, 44, "and we came crashing through with Birdbrain, which is completely maximalist from a movement point of view." From Feb. 20, at Sadler's Wells in London, the extremely muscular choreographer has the chance to further shift perceptions of the body and how it should move through space when he presents...
...that's only an appetizer for what dance-goers in Spain, Slovenia and France can expect later this year, when ADT presents its latest and most maximalist work thus far. In the wake of a season at the Sydney Festival, Devolution pushes Stewart's high-voltage style to bursting point, pitting man against machine, muscle against metal. For this, the Adelaide-based choreographer has worked with Montreal "roboticist" Louis-Philippe Demers to engineer a fleet of moving machines that interact with ADT's 10 dancers on stage. By the end, performers don computer-programmed prosthetics in a dystopian dance with...
...During the work's three-year gestation, Stewart gradually warmed to Demers' motorized monsters and was "devastated" when two of the creatures broke down just before the Jan. 24 opening in Sydney. "It's interesting because it was a similar response to having a really good dancer suddenly having to go off with an injury," he recalls. Illuminated, stalked and interrogated by the machines, Stewart's dancers are cast in a new light, with primordial movements evoking the dawn of mankind. "Even though we've lived under civilization for millennia," Stewart says, "we are still very much driven...
...Since taking the artistic reins of ADT in 1999, Stewart's own instincts have been unerring. Then a freelance choreographer and former dancer, his name was less well-known than that of Meryl Tankard, his high-flying predecessor, who had exited from the company after creative clashes with the board. In his 1995 piece for the Melbourne Festival, Spectre in the Covert Memory, Stewart had already begun his choreographic experiments with strength and power, and at ADT he would take this further, training his young troupe in yoga, martial arts and gymnastics. While Tankard's dancers were known for sailing...