A jaw-dropping collaboration between Brisbane’s Australasian Dance Collective and The Netherlands’ Club Guy & Roni, Studio Boris Acket, and HIIIT, Bad Nature was a transportive new work about the relationship between humanity and the rest of the natural world.
Bad Nature was choreographed by Club Guy & Roni co-founders Guy Weizman and Roni Haver with ADC Artistic Director Amy Hollingsworth and Associate Artistic Director Jack Lister. Making its world premiere in Brisbane as part of Brisbane Festival, Bad Nature will also tour to several locations in the Netherlands and France from October to December.
From the first moments, the immersion of the performance was in full force. Smoke poured across the stage and the dancers moved slowly through it, ankle deep, in broad-brimmed, full body costumes that evoked both hazmat gear and beekeeping suits. Yellow-orange lighting that had suggested a golden sunrise over the clouds suddenly seemed to transform the smoke into toxic fumes.
The pace of the work shifted repeatedly throughout, exploring interpersonal power dynamics as well as environmental care and crisis. There were scenes of violence and intimacy, the swarming and skittering of frantic insects, and sudden drops to the floor from a flat-out run. The animalistic physicality of the choreography – flapping, crouching, leaping – recalled that we are only organic creatures, and are subject to our environment in the same way all animals are.
The six Company Artists of the Australasian Dance Collective were joined by six dancers of the Club Guy & Roni ensemble to perform this piece. Despite there being four co-choreographers, Bad Nature felt like a unified whole. The choreography used the larger ensemble to great visual effect with movements performed in canon and the creation of shapes with the entire group. The stage remained busy and exciting, but not to the extent that my attention felt fractured.
The twelve dancers moved with excellent synchronicity and brought a dynamic emotionality to the stage as well as fluid strength and unwavering, explosive energy across the 60-minute performance. Some of the dancers wore microphones for particular scenes, exaggerating the sound of their breath and noises of exertion or discomfort, feeding into the soundscape.
Bad Nature achieved an impressive scale of spectacle in the Powerhouse Theatre. Costume design by Dutch creative studio Maison the Faux contained details that might have been scales or pixels, wing-like additions, and layers that were added and removed onstage.
Set, lighting, and sound design by Boris Acket was integral to, and inseparable from, the storytelling of the choreography and the performance was as much a showcase of design as dance. Bad Nature was a work of arresting images – the dancers lying still on the floor with only their faces illuminated, rolling and writhing in slow motion beneath the translucent fabric that fell from the ceiling in a breathless moment, and pulling one another carefully, protectively, from beneath the lights as if from a wreckage.
Acket’s lighting, with collaborating lighting designer Ben Hughes, was seamlessly enmeshed with the other design elements. From a blinding sunrise and solar eclipse to flickering overheads that suggested a bunker, and the integration of lights and fabric to become an undulating kinetic sculpture: stormy waves and endless sand dunes, a haven and a threat.
Sound design, with collaborating composers Louis Frere-Harvey and Frank Wienk from Dutch musician collective HIIIT, built a dystopian symphony from industrial and organic sounds: grunting humans and groaning metal, the thumping of explosions and electronica, contrasting birdsong with buzzing alarms and bodies hitting the floor. Frere-Harvey, Max Frimout, and Niels Meliefste also joined the dancers onstage, bringing the soundscape to life in real time.
Bad Nature was a propulsive, unforgettable performance, exemplifying the very best of contemporary dance – collaborative, thrilling, innovative, and emotionally and intellectually engaging.
Bad Nature was performed at the Brisbane Powerhouse, New Farm, from 3 – 7 September 2025
For further information, visit the Brisbane Festival website
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