Adelaide Festival 2020 Dance Program
Dance will be back in full force at Adelaide Festival 2020 with an enticing program commencing in Febuary. Established in 1973, it is Australia’s first capital city arts venue and hosts more than one million people annually. As well as presenting theatre, dance, music, and exhibitions, Adelaide Festival Centre creates diverse festivals to inspire, challenge, educate, and entertain.
Enter Achilles
This show by Lloyd Newson was first performed at the 1996 Adelaide Festival, 24 years later it is being given a re-mount. In Lloyd’s own words “ with the advent of #MeToo and Brexit, it’s a timely moment to revisit the work” Enter Achilles. It could make for an interesting piece Lloyd is from Albury and would be good to look at his journey from country NSW, being the founder of DV8, Enter Achilles being made into an Emmy Award winning film and now re-mounting the work for the 2020 Adelaide Festival, 24 years later. This will also be Lloyd’s first-ever collaboration with another company, the world renowned Ballet Rambert.
https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/enter-achilles/
Trois Grandes Fugues – Lyon Opera Ballet
In 2020 we celebrate 250 years since Beethoven’s birth, and this is a thrilling riposte to River Phoenix’s assertion that “You can’t dance to Beethoven”.
Lyon Opera Ballet invited three of the world’s most thrilling choreographers – American Lucinda Childs, Belgian Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and French Maguy Marin to each take on choreographing a response to Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, the piece of music that Glenn Gould dubbed “the most astonishing piece in musical literature”. Childs uses 12 dancers, de Keersmaeker 8 and Maguy Marin just 4. They are performed back to back to a trio of different recordings of the same work. (The version by the Debussy Quartet is two minutes faster). The first thing to report is that the experience of listening to a piece of classical music three times – particularly for an anyone who does not have a background in classical music – is a revelation. The New York Times said “Many directors might have feared boring audiences by playing the same score three times. Instead, the experience is riveting, opening up and deepening Beethoven’s complex, impassioned score…” The second is that the three responses from these three extraordinary but completely different choreographers is utterly thrilling: Childs: elegant, spare and mathematically precise; De Keersmaeker: for someone who is often quite formal and can feel humourless this is the most exhilarating, joyous and free-spirited work I’ve ever seen her from her and finally, Marin who gives us an intense, reckless, blood-red emotion. It’s an incredible event.
Childs: Lyon opera Orchestra
De Keersmaeker – Debussy Quartet (2 minutes faster)
Marin: Quartetto Italiano – Maguy Marin is available around mid Nov for an interview if keen?
https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/lyon-opera-ballet/
Two Crews & Between Tiny Cities
With Two Crews also being in the Sydney Festival thought a piece on Nick Power could be interesting, bringing together two unique crews from opposite sides of the globe. Nick is of course also presenting Between Tiny Cities in the Adelaide Festival. ‘His practice spans from remote Aboriginal communities in the desert to the stages of the most prestigious contemporary dance festivals in Europe. Crossing complex divides of place, culture, language and form is Nick’s forte.’
To find out more visit: https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/whats-on/
https://www.intimatespectacle.com.au/nick-power/
https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/between-tiny-cities/
https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/two-crews/
Image of Grandes Fugues by Bertrand Stofleth