Feature: Brindabella

DEEP IN THE WOODS

Richard Watts investigates the latest production by Melbourne dance company, Balletlab.

Brindabella image by Jeff Busby

Inspired by French poet, film-maker and designer Jean Cocteau's La Belle et le Bête, the latest production by avant-garde Melbourne dance company Balletlab is a baroque, sensual fantasia: Beauty and the Beast given a queer, post-modern bent.

In Brindabella, New York’s Miguel Gutierrez and Balletlab Artistic Director Phillip Adams have combined their choreographic sensibilities to craft a work that draws upon and engages with a variety of contemporary artforms, ensuring that the resulting work is more than just a new dance work.

“The thing that drew me to Phillip is this common language,” says composer David Chisholm, who worked previously with Adams on Balletlab’s previous production, Origami, and is again contributing to Brindabella, this time with a soundtrack that will be performed live.

“I think it was a queer aesthetic initially, but when I started looking at the work he was doing, I thought that he was probably the most inventive choreographer that I’d seen.”

Chisholm had spent time previously in Glasgow, a city he describes as “a real melting pot of contemporary work; yet when I saw Phillip’s work I was struck by it; I hadn’t previously seen anything like it.”

“I liked the layering of his choreographic language … and the fact that he wasn’t working just from a choreographic perspective, but engaging external disciplines, like architecture, like fashion, like music. I thought he had an opinion about how to work, and he brought together a group of artists to tease out how to work around a particular theme or a central idea.”

Not surprisingly, such an approach to the creation of new work did not develop overnight. As a company, Balletlab has been steadily developing for 10 years.

“I’m just finding now that its identity has become apparent,” says Phillip Adams. “I put that down to experience, but I also feel that it takes that long for a company or an organisation to [distil] its own profile, what it wants to say to the world."

"In the case of Balletlab, it pays homage to the proscenium arch ballet. We’ve transformed it … and I’ve lent from and bastardised from as many cultures as I have inherited, being a queer artist; so I’m finding that Balletlab is able to engage with various cultures. It just so happens in the case of Brindabella that we’re identifying with the queer culture.”

Essentially, for his latest production Adams has taken the classic story of Beauty and the Beast and queered it. Instead of Disney’s saccharine fairytale romance, he has crafted a version of the tale which evokes the 19th century’s terror of the mysterious Australian bush, yet which merges it with contemporary society’s cynicism of what it means to be a man: a cynicism which Adams explores through dance.

“Dance … has to remain constant in my focus,” Adams says, “because … I’ve fallen into this lifestyle of what it means to be an artist, and at age 42 it seems to be now my vocation my life."

"I am, and will be always, artistically inclined to make dance. It’s not that I’m unemployable; it isn’t that at all,” he laughs. “It just becomes part of your blood.”

“Ballet is a technique that has been used so much that we can’t better it; that’s all been done. Instead we’re going back, retrograde, down, right back to the end of the line to look at the morphing of the body in a hallucinogenic state, like a fairytale.”

Like Cocteau’s surreal 1937 version of Beauty and the Beast, Phillip’s new ballet strives to adapt the classical fairytale to a modern stage. He may not be the first to create such a melange of images, times and ideas, but Adams is certainly one of the first artists to create such a boldly queer re-imagining of the work.

“Beauty and the Beast is the starting point at which I began to imagine Brindabella, but then I began to play to play with costume, with homoerotica, with queer culture specifically related to bears … the Beast morphing into the Plushy cult… all these little subliminal images play a role in my work,” he says.

“This is semi-autobiographical, but it’s not a coming out piece, it’s not an AIDS piece; it’s about beauty: transferring Beauty falling in love with the Beast to the dacking of jeans in a back room. There’s something beautiful and masculine, something absolutely desirable about men being together. It’s more than VicBears, its more than Club 80; it’s about desire. Human desire.”

Balletlab’s Brindabella shows at The CUB Malthouse Theatre, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank: Wednesday 5 – Saturday 8 December at 8pm, 2pm and 8pm Saturday. Bookings 9685 5111.

This article originally appeared in MCV #361 on Thursday November 29 2007.