Past works

BalletLab works demonstrate diverse creative ideas that are conceptually rigorous and experimental, often profound yet highly entertaining.  The works are inquisitive, exuberantly idiosyncratic and often a fascinating hybrid of mediums. Our works - past, present and future - offer an experience that goes beyond the traditional realm of dance and performance making.  Our philosophy in dance encompasses a cross-disciplinary sensibility in movement, choreography and the construction of narrative. We produce our creations between residency partnerships, museums, festivals and commissions. Each project reveals the importance of dialogue between director and dancers in the collaborative process, utilising very open and experimental methodologies.

LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV

LIVE WITH IT we all have HIV is a striking, cross-arts performance experience, tracking the still present, important issue of HIV/AIDS, and how it impacts those of us who live with HIV/AIDS bodily; and those of us who are profoundly affected by the virus in other ways. Learn more...

Axeman Lullaby

Axeman Lullaby is an collaborative exploration and reflection on the physical and climatic characteristics of Australian wood chopping and early Victorian bush settlements. Axeman Lullaby recreates a sense of Australian cinematic landscapes. In the 70's Australian cinema produced a flood of films that captured a raw and experimental identity about suburban and indigenous myth. These films offered a surreal and eerie portrayal about our past and unsettled future. The disquiet doesn't stop until the final pendulum swing of the axe. Axeman Lullaby is a hypnotic state, shattered. Learn more...

Brindabella

Brindabella is a baroque fantasia, a spiritual and strange underworld of forest inhabitants adapted from the French folktale Jean Cocteau's La Belle et le Bête. Brindabella re-imagines this narrative across both genre and period. Brindabella recasts the Beast into three roles, splintering the central male figure of the story in order to explore the many dimensions of masculinity. Brooke Stamp performs a gender ambivalent 'Belle' in this heavily testosteroned world. Set design by Bluebottle simultaneously evokes a baroque forest and playground, complimented by incredible costume design by Doyle Barrow.
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Origami

Origami is inspired by the ancient Japanese art of folding paper and the intricate, tactile, and intimate nature of pop-up books. Origami sees BalletLab partnering with the award winning BURO Architects and 3 Deep Design in collaborations that fuse industrial modernist architecture, visual design and the living body in space into a cohesive and innovative performance language. The concept of the "fold" in architecturally designed set is blended meticulously into permeable architectural crevices and abstract panels and partitions - offering a dynamic physical relationship within the stage space as they are folded and unfolded by the performers. The refined choreographic vocabulary articulates the inherent synergy of a complex architectural design, and consists of complex architectural partnering that at times directly correlates to origami instruction manuals. Following a natural landscape, where progressions of sea to land to mountains to sky occur, falling bodies slide quietly through the designed spaces, folding and creating valleys and mounds. Learn more...

Fiction

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. Learn more...

Nativity

Part Twilight Zone. Part Australian Childhood circa 1950's.  Nativity is an intimate, surreal tour of Phillip Adams' fantastic parallel worlds of domestic detail and visions of utopia. Fluctuating between a contemporary dance performance and an installation, Nativity challenges audience expectation of dance presentation.  The performance takes place in a 1950's suburban house, complete with coffee table, fruit bowl, hills hoist, backyard fence and the staircase to nowhere. Read more...

Above/Lamb

Above is an ebb and flow of transitional stages resulting in rebirth. Like a fairytale in the guise of a road move, Above tells of primal initiation rites, dreams of immortality and magical incarnations. Learn more...