UA31316 Lumen Spring 2024 Final Digital - Flipbook - Page 27
Re-activating Australian
Dance Theatre’s archive
for the future
By Maggie Tonkin
In 1965 Elizabeth Cameron Dalman founded Australia’s oldest
contemporary dance company, Australian Dance Theatre,
in Adelaide. ADT, as it has come to be known, flourished
throughout the politically progressive Dunstan decade, and
many of the works made in that period engaged with the pressing
social issues of the time, including war, gender politics and the
position of First Nations peoples within the Australian imaginary.
Under successive Artistic Directors (Jonathan Taylor, Leigh
Warren, Meryl Tankard and Garry Stewart) the company has
become an internationally recognised dance powerhouse, and its
alumni have danced and choreographed in companies all over
the world.
The resultant work, directed by Daniel Riley, will be
programmed in the 2025 Adelaide Festival as part of the
company’s 60th anniversary celebrations.
In partnership with Wiradjuri choreographer Daniel Riley,
ADT’s first Indigenous Artistic Director, this three-year ARC
Linkage project involving the universities of Adelaide and
Melbourne seeks to document the company’s history while
also interrogating the function of the dance archive.
Other outcomes from the Linkage project include an exhibition
of the company’s history which will also feature in the 2025 Festival
program, a digital archive to be housed at Melbourne University’s
Digital Dance and Theatre Platform, case studies of the impact of
gender on Australian female choreographers, a documentary screen
play, and the development of innovative methods of preserving
costumes using 3D imaging.
The project will address the broader question of how dance can
be inherited, specifically through documenting a process we call
‘Re-Activation,’ in which the company will revisit early repertoire,
some of which was made ‘about’ Aboriginal culture, and
investigate how this work can be retrieved from memory
and re-considered in the light of contemporary
understanding of First Nations cultural sovereignty,
in order to germinate a new work.
The project is led by Dr Maggie Tonkin (University of Adelaide), with
fellow Chief Investigators Adjunct Associate Professor Cheryl Stock
(Adelaide), and Professor Rachel Fensham (University of Melbourne).
Rupture: all the stars unshining premiered as part of the 2022
Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art at Carriageworks, Sydney.
The work featured an inter-media installation that was punctuated
by a series of live performances that blurred the line between
installation and performance.
Rebooting the Muse
By Mark Carroll
The ARC-funded Rebooting the Muse project grew out of a
recognition that the performing arts in Australia today face
challenges on multiple fronts, not the least being the devastation
wrought by the Covid pandemic on live performance.
This was followed by Rupture: at the seams, a new version
developed specifically for ILA’s ‘The Lab’ in Light Square.
Featuring a soundtrack composed by Harrald for an octet of
musicians from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra with surround
electronics and immersive projections, it had sold out performances.
Add to that the dizzying pace of change ushered in by AI and
other digital technologies, and it’s no surprise that the arts in
general are at a pivotal juncture.
Mark Carroll is Professor at the Elder Conservatorium of Music.
Led by the Director of the Elder Conservatorium, Professor
Anna Goldsworthy, the project partners – Immersive Light and Art
(ILA, formerly Light), the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, State
Theatre Company of South Australia, Patch Theatre, and
Illuminate Adelaide – are making vital contributions to futureproofing the performing arts. These include hosting public forums
grappling with the impact of AI on creativity, and Piano Lab, Anna
Goldsworthy’s two-day festival that juxtaposed the traditional piano
recital format with cutting-edge immersive digital technologies.
No less imaginative and thought-provoking is Rupture, an
ambitious multimedia experimental work created by Jesse
Boylan, Linda Dement, Virginia Barratt, and the Elder
Conservatorium’s Luke Harrald. Informed by the work of the
trauma-focused psychotherapist Jenna Tuke, Rupture has been
presented in two iterations.
LUMEN
