The Adelaide Festival has announced three of its major presentations for next year, and two of them are dance productions.
After sell-out Adelaide Festival seasons of The Rite of Spring/common ground[s] (2022) and Nelken (2016), Pina Bausch’s legendary Tanztheater Wuppertal will return to the Festival Theatre. The program, Club Amour, will allow audiences a chance to see the company for the first time under its new artistic director, Boris Charmatz, considered one of the pioneers of French conceptual dance.
On the bill will be Pina Bausch’s Café Müller, considered by many to be one of the most influential dance pieces of the 20th century. It will be paired with two works by Charmatz, both of which will be experienced by audiences standing on the stage. In Aatt enen tionon, his radical first choreographic work from 1996, dancers are isolated over three elevated platforms, while in herses, duo, two dancers are tangled closely together, their exposed bodies never leaving one another.
The other major dance highlight will be Australian Dance Theatre in the premiere of of Artistic Director Daniel Riley’s A Quiet Language. The company will be celebrating its 60th year in 2025, and this work promises to "fearlessly interrogate its legacy in a work that sees the company step backwards and forwards, exploring the history of Australian dance as it is held in the body and written across the country upon which we tread, and transmuting the rebellious energy of the company’s early days into an electric new era". The work will take "inspiration from the founding spirit of the company, and the fearlessness of our founding Artistic Director, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman," says Riley.
The third major presentation to be announced early is the opera Innocence, directed by prolific Australian director Simon Stone. This new opera has music by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and book by Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen, and will make its exclusive Australian debut after its premiere season at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and subsequent seasons at London’s Royal Opera House, Dutch National Opera and San Francisco Opera. Following its Adelaide Festival season, the opera will have its American premiere at the Met in New York.
Confirmed principals include Australia’s own Teddy Tahu Rhodes and international opera singers Sean Panikkar, Jenny Carlstedt, Tuomas Pursio and Claire de Sevigne. The score will be performed by Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Clément Mao-Takacs, and sung by a combined chorus of 32 Adelaide Chamber Singers and State Opera South Australia Chorus members in an astonishing nine different languages with English surtitles.
The current Adelaide Festival Artistic Director is Brett Sheehy, who has stepped in at short notice after the departure of Ruth Mackenzie midway through her tenure to take a new post as Program Director, Arts, Culture and Creative Industries Policy within the South Australian Department of Premier & Cabinet.
“The three productions in our avant-launch are each extraordinary artistic achievements," he says. "I want to thank former artistic directors Neil Armfield AO and Rachel Healy for securing Innocence. I remember with awe Simon’s brilliant, genre-breaking realisation of The Cherry Orchard for my 2014 Melbourne Theatre Company season, before he began his stellar international career, and my own introduction to Pina Bausch and Tanztheater Wuppertal was at the 1982 Adelaide Festival.
"Considered by many to be Pina’s masterwork, Café Müller is a pivotal creation in dance history, and to have it accompanied by two of the finest works by Boris Charmatz gives us an holistic dance experience as outstanding as any previously seen at an Australian festival, and I thank my predecessor Ruth Mackenzie CBE for inviting this production. Finally, we have ADT’s A Quiet Language, with both its founding and current directors in conversation collaborating on a singular dance event like no other, created by this magnificent South Australian-born, international company.”
A Quiet Language will be performed at the Odeon Theatre from 26 February – 5 March, 2025.
Innocence will be performed at the Festival Theatre from 28 February – 5 March, 2025.
Club Amour will be performed at the Festival Theatre from 10 – 16 March, 2025.