Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
Reviewed: September 22
The momentousness of Savage’s creation and premiere at the Adelaide Festival Centre is well documented online. It is Wiradjuri dancer, choreographer and Bangarra Dance Theatre-alumnus Daniel Riley’s first full-length production as Artistic Director of the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), which for the first time has an Aboriginal artistic director, despite the company’s long history of performing works about (and frequently without the involvement of) Aboriginal people.
A one-act, non-narrative work, Savage’s opening night took place at the Adelaide Festival Centre, performed by the ADT’s ensemble of six dancers, supported by Riley and nine further guest artists from the Adelaide College of the Arts. The distinction between ensemble and student dancers here and in program notes is of little significance to the audience’s experience of Savage, an undulating series of interconnected solo and group scenes.
Although Riley set out to make something that “could only happen here,” it is visually and aurally more akin to Gucci’s Autumn-Winter 2022 ready-to-wear runway and 1990s Berlin than Tarntanya (Adelaide) in any era. Generally, Savage is of its time rather than of its place — and attractively glossy. Jaadwa composer James Howard’s music, in its loudest moments, recalls the film Run Lola Run (1998). Worimi designer Dean Cross’s minimalistic set consists of a cyclorama, white dance floor, a black circular rug placed centre stage and hurricane fencing on casters, one of which is partially concealed by a reflective tarp. Cross’s set is coupled with his (probably store-bought) costumes of sneakers and sportswear (excepting two white, woolly, Bigfoot-like creatures). Matthew Adey’s lighting design — a flattening yellow glow; or fluorescent battens common to commercial real estate; or pastel gradients — is “Instagrammable” and unrestrained.
This does not deny the work any emplaced identity as such, although it situates Savage among the works of Riley’s contemporaries in which a sense of place is disturbed, including Marrugeku’s Le Dernier Appel (2018) with its apparent airport terminal setting, and Bundjulung and Ngāpuhi dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi’s Monumental (2021), presented in a gallery’s white cube.
Counteracting the seeming absence of contextual information in onstage design elements, Savage is inescapably loaded with historical baggage. Indeed “T.H.E./V.I.O.L.E.N.C.E/O.F/F.O.R.G.E.T.T.I.N.G” is the work’s subtitle, printed on marketing collateral, disclosing a rehearsal room engagement with settler-colonial invasion and its legacies that is not immediately intelligible to Savage’s audience. Moreover, incidentally, Savage’s opening night coincided with the National Day of Mourning to commemorate the death of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II — a still vivid (and celebrated) symbol of imperialism in the Australian imagination — against the background of prominent Aboriginal spokespeople’s long-neglected calls, since at least 1938, for another kind of Day of Mourning.
Whereas, at first glance, Savage is composed of dance theatre’s most common, task-oriented “refrains” — relocating the aforementioned set pieces; rearranging plastic, stackable chairs that litter the stage in many scenes — Savage’s highlights are more subtle, choreographic allegories that relate to broadly relevant debates, such as those concerning representation, consultation and consent.
Upon entering the auditorium, audience members are offered program notes and yellow pamphlets featuring the bold black text of a warning sign: “KAURNA YERTA” (Kaurna land) printed on one side, “SOVEREIGNTY NEVER CEDED” on the other. Unlike the customary pre-performance, pre-recorded Welcome to Country with which the local audience is familiar, instead we interrupt a lone dancer, Noongar woman Jada Narkle, in a private moment on stage, seated on the floor and writing in a notebook. Because the customary Welcome is withheld, we are led to believe that the performance was always already happening (and not for the sole enjoyment of audience members sipping wine from plastic cups and relishing their public holiday). Narkle exits and returns to the stage, to continue journalling; however, the notebook is absent. Her thoughts and opinions are not recorded, but rather reduced to fleeting flicks of the wrist near to the floor.
The performance begins to gain momentum as Narkle seeks out a chair to take a seat downstage, perhaps to enter a dialogue with her audience. Once she is seated, there is a sudden blackout, inviting associations with Dhungatti man and Archibald Prize-winning painter Blak Douglas’s portrait of Aboriginal actress Ursula Yovich, Queen of Her Own Stage. Like an observer of Douglas’s painting, the audience notes that it is difficult for Aboriginal performers to assert themselves, even when they have access to stages.
These opening moments are in stark contrast to the solo of an attention-grabbing, non-Aboriginal figure in a blazer and pink sneakers — an office upstart on their way to a corporate seat of power? — embodied by Brianna Kell, whose gestural mimicry of TED Talks and snake oil salesmanship is mesmerising. In a later scene, above a din of recorded whispers, Kell’s persona navigates the stage holding a megaphone. In short, she and her character can leave an impression.
Dramaturgically, the most skilfully resolved group scene exhibits parallels between contact improvisation and, beyond the theatre, the involvement of “end customers” in decision and policy making. A central figure, performed by Sebastian Geilings, rejects the taken-for-granted notion that dancers’ bodies are docile, available to the touch and manipulation of others. He does not consent to the group action, rejects the gestures of care offered by cast members. As a consequence, he stymies their well-meaning jam. Once the group affords Geilings’s character agency and responds to his explicit requests for contact and collaboration, the interaction unfolds harmoniously. In the context of Savage, the scene could be interpreted as an argument for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, a rebuke for governments’ policy nightmares.
The purpose of the above detailed descriptions of Savage’s choreographic strengths is to emphasise that ADT’s core activity, dancing, is safe in Riley’s hands. We can also look forward to ADT declaring its relevance to worlds offstage.
- LUKE FORBES
Photos above are all scenes from 'Savage', photographed by Sam Roberts.
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