Fiction
Premiered
May 19th 2005Choreography: Phillip Adams
and Rebecca Hilton
Artistic Associate:
Linda Sastradipradja
Live Sound Composition:
Lynton Carr
Performers: Brooke Stamp,
Ryan Lowe, Carlee Mellow,
Joanne White, Tim Harvey,
Clair Peters
Lighting: Ben Cisterne
Graphic Design: 3 Deep Design Photography: Jeff Busby
Short video promo. Click here.
Synopsis
Choreography seems to be presented polemically. At one end there is the traditional artificial and fictional narrative based ballet. At the extreme other end there is the (abstract) process. Our aim is to transgress from one extreme to the other. Fiction is viewed as one complete work by two choreographers. Phillip Adams has purposefully created a magnificent Arabian ballet complete with flying carpet, genie and dialogue. He has translated to stage the cinematic nostalgia of a Hollywood Arabian fantasy romance. The light of dawn illuminates the desert the audience surveys the massive backdrop of a full-blown technicolour sand dunes. And so the journey begins…. As Adams’ ballet draws to a close the backdrop is seamlessly flown out revealing a modern day New World of fiction that is blended with the old. Rebecca Hilton’s Fiction is now performed in real space. The stage is stripped bare except for a surreal picket fence that divides the stage in half. Hilton’s Fiction continues using the modern day family as a structure. The ballet drama is removed and then replaced with a stylised but highly abstracted narrative. There is a sense of deadpan humour in revealing the behavioural nuances and conflict/comfort found in the nuclear family. Fiction is a comment on the way we view our worlds in modern fiction and in retrospect mythology. The imagery of this work is epic, Hollywood technicolour juxtaposed with modern culture that is as intricate and sumptuous as a Persian carpet.
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Performance Schedule
None available at this time
Images
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Reviews
“The dance company BalletLab has been anarchic ever since Phillip Adams founded it in 1998. It is ever changing and entertains many with its excellent dancers and Adams’s quirky humour”.
Lee Christofis, The Australian
“Bodies drop on the floor, slap and droop along a wall or fold like dough across others with suppressed hostility until rage and defiance blow the movement into a series of robust counterpoints”.
Lee Christofis, The Australian “I think Phillip Adams is the number one choreographer in Australia; no-one comes close to him for sheer insanity and comic genius, let alone his choreography, whether vertiginously deconstructed ballet or the kind of multi-limbed partnering that should belong in the best of Hong Kong martial arts flicks, he's the crack-smoking Grand Theft Auto number one playa of contemporary dance south of the Tropic of Cancer”.
Frances d’Ath, Supernaut Online review “Choreographer Phillip Adams has a taste for the bizarrely kitsch and, with a harem ballet on a Persian carpet and a wooden genie communing the dancers Fiction is no exception.”
Stephanie Glickman, The Herald Sun
“Rebecca Hilton’s orange clad dancers enact family rituals and relationships. The intense colour is striking and the dancers play off this unusual energy”. Stephanie Glickman, The Herald Sun “Fiction, choreography by Phillip Adams and Rebecca Hilton is a dance equivalent of an exercise in creative writing employing two entirely different approaches to narrative.”Hilary Crampton, The Age “Adams work begins as a sort of Boys Own adventure in some imagined desert. Beautifully constructed incidents – the camel journey, frieze – like against the desert backdrop, is inventive and appealing”
Hilary Crampton, The Age “Hilton’s dancers are locked against the back wall, their gestures puppet-like, apathetic: limbs fling, joints collapse, faces pout”Hilary Crampton, The Age “Hilton’s choreography is carefully balanced: the small incidents build to reveal the complexity of familial relationships – the good, the bad and the occasionally ugly”.
Hilary Crampton, The Age
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