Everything for everybody: welcome to the dance multiverse
Brisbane Festival exclusive Bad Nature combines awe-inspiring movement, multisensory design, international collaboration, couture and more, pushing the boundaries of perception and dance.
As we watch AI developing in leaps and bounds, Bad Nature is a timely exploration of the increasingly uneasy balance involving technology, the environment and humanity.
The work’s combination of universal themes and international collaboration teaming locally based Australasian Dance Collective (ADC) with Dutch creatives – Club Guy & Roni (CGR), Studio Boris Acket (set, lighting and sound design), HIIIT (onstage musical trio) and Maison the Faux (costumes) – give this Brisbane Festival world premiere global resonance.
Bad Nature’s concept and multi-disciplinary approach reflect ADC’s stated vision of using art to contemplate and navigate an increasingly complex present and future, and technology in the service of humanity while expanding artistic boundaries.
The hour-long piece is stunningly atmospheric, wildly creative and weirdly beautiful. There are shrouded black figures, varying formations of clouds, smoke, fog and haze, giant gongs, a single bright light resembling the sun that later becomes a searchlight turned on the audience, and a morphing parachute silk canopy suspending pendant lights.
As you might expect from that array, the layering of elements is sensorially intense and the mood mostly unsettling, underpinned by percussion and lightened only occasionally by more melodic interludes. Those sensitive to stimulus might feel overloaded.
Jointly choreographed by ADC’s artistic director Amy Hollingsworth and associate AD Jack Lister with CGR’s co-artistic directors Roni Haver and Guy Weizman, Bad Nature teams six performers from each troupe. While reflecting different movement foundations and styles, they blend effectively as an ensemble when required and complement each other at other times, the strengths of each group highlighted in solos, duets and trios.
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While the circumstances of humans seemed clear at times, such as being at the mercy of technology – for example when the pendant lights pinned them down – and unable to connect physically by giving off electric shocks, my guest and I found the overall narrative up for interpretation, debating our impressions afterwards.
What is certain, though, is that Bad Nature is richly imaginative – beautiful, bold, adventurous and intriguing – and superbly executed.
Bad Nature continues at the Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, until September 7.