AUSTRALIA FESTIVAL - a two-week celebration of Australian dance.
Attractor
APRIL 29 – MAY 1
Indonesia’s tour-de-force music duo Senyawa and Melbourne’s choreographic luminaries Lucy Guerin and Gideon Obarzanek join forces with two of Australia’s leading dance companies, Lucy Guerin Inc and Dancenorth to create Attractor. Senyawa reinterprets the Javanese tradition of entering trance through dance and music as a powerful, secular, present-day ritual. Dancers are propelled into wild abandonment and ecstatic release, creating a visceral experience for the audience, as unrehearsed volunteers join the company on stage, to dissolve the demarcations between professionals and amateurs.
Australian Dance Theatre
MAY 3 – 6
The astonishingly powerful Australian Dance Theatre presents a beguiling exploration of the natural world in The Beginning of Nature. This compelling work possesses a hypnotic score sung in Kaurna, the first language of the Adelaide Plains, where the company resides. At times fierce and explosive and at others graceful and meditative, this evocative depiction of the complex rhythms in nature will delight and inspire as it elucidates humanity’s evolving relationship with nature.
The Australian Ballet
MAY 9 – 12
The Australian Ballet presents a program of works by homegrown choreographic talent. Alice Topp’s acclaimed Aurum, supported by The Joyce Theater’s Nureyev Prize, draws inspiration from the Japanese art of kintsugi—repairing cracked pottery with precious metals—and explores damage, healing, and the beauty of our flaws. The dancers’ powerful movement is framed in breathtaking stage design featuring a reflective golden floor and ripples of burnished light.
