Australasian Dance Collective (ADC) has premiered Halcyon, a new contemporary dance work by Jack Lister, at the Brisbane Powerhouse for a limited season. Seeking to immerse the audience in a stylistic realm of intrigue and glamour, Halcyon drew inspiration from crime noir and the golden age of Hollywood and integrated contemporary dance, film, and electronic music.
Commissioned by ADC Artistic Director Amy Hollingsworth, Halcyon was conceived, directed, and choreographed by ADC Creative Associate and company artist Jack Lister and is his first full-length work.
In the same way that Jungian archetypes were employed in ADC’s Lucie In the Sky earlier this year, film noir tropes and stereotypical characters were used to place the audience in a familiar setting, of which they had inherent understanding and expectations: a film director (Lister), a hardened detective (Harrison Elliott), a gowned starlet (Gabrielle Nankivell) and her stunt double (Siobhan Lynch), an unhinged, cackling showgirl (Lilly King), a white-suited card shark (Lily Potger) and a villain in a black turtleneck (Taiga Kita-Leong). Costuming realised by Zoe Griffiths cemented these archetypal characters, and the strong cohesion of these elements held the work together in place of narrative progression.
The audience entered the performance space via a side door, with several of the dancers already moving in character. Two raised catwalk-style stages dominated the centre of the Powerhouse Theatre, with the white-taped outline of a body between them. The balcony walkways were also used for one brief scene, and projections and film were directed primarily at the back wall. The audience stood around the edges of the theatre for the duration, occasionally shifting for a better view of the dancers. The promenade style of the performance added an element of novelty but nothing else, and 75 minutes was a long time to remain standing when a semi-circular and/or tiered seating arrangement could have allowed for the same visibility.
Since his early work with Queensland Ballet, where he is now Associate Choreographer, Lister has had a strong and distinctive choreographic voice and the Halcyon choreography, developed in collaboration with the ADC Company Artists, was no exception. A whirling pas de deux between Harrison Elliott and Gabrielle Nankivell was a highlight, although the pace of the performance began to drag with so many brief solos and duets. The group choreography was the strongest, with a particularly memorable sequence performed against the far wall of the theatre, and a rotating dance-theatre interrogation scene.
Original music composed by Louis Frere-Harvey and sound design by Frere-Harvey and Mick Trevisan brought together thumping electronic music with excerpts from classic films like Casablanca and Gilda. Film and visual design by Ryan Renshaw, projected onto the back wall of the theatre, drew from archival footage, shot footage, and AI-generated imagery to create a collage of birds, blood splatter, and more. A camera wheeled around the stage by Lister in his Director persona also fed live footage into the projections.
Intermittent references in the visuals were made to the kingfisher and the eagle, although their link to the rest of the performance was tenuous. The word halcyon is derived, via Latin, from the Greek word for kingfisher – alkyṓn – and the eagle was presented as a threat of violence, being a bird of prey. Lister’s poetic and cryptic programme note suggested that the two birds represented love and hate: Though they do not share the same wingspan, from a great distance how can you tell which is which? […] Adoration and envy are separated by the barest of margins.
Lighting design by Christine Felmingham, including lighting bars along the raised stages and a lighting rig that was dramatically raised and lowered, complemented the projected film and animations and shifted focus around the room for the dancers’ solo and duet performances.
Visually interesting and driven by well-worn characters and human emotion, Halcyon was a divergence from ADC’s recent technology-centric productions and Lister’s choreography imbued the ensemble’s signature movement style with a new freshness. Australasian Dance Collective continue to demonstrate their commitment to taking risks, breaking new ground, and always seeking to expand what they do.
Halcyon was performed at the Powerhouse Theatre, New Farm, from 9 – 12 November 2023
For further information, visit the ADC website
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