TWO FEET
UN POYO ROJO
OUT OF CHAOS …
Adelaide Festival 2019, Feb 28, March 1 and 2
★★★★½
Two Feet, one of the Adelaide Festival's star attractions for 2019, is extraordinary and brilliant. Originally made by Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard as a full evening solo for herself, it has been recreated for the Russian-born ballerina Natalia Osipova.
Water floods the stage like tears during Natalia Osipova’s performance.
Credit:RVANSTARREX
It is the intertwined story of two dancers, one born in Russia in 1895, the other in mid-1900s Australia. But it also ranges over the crushing repetition and potential cruelty of dance training, historic ballets, social dance and the personal demands.
The Russian of the story is Olga Spessivtzeva, who reached the top in her career touring around the world, notably as Giselle, but suffered breakdowns and ended her life in a mental hospital.
Natalia Osipova, who performs the demanding dual role, is also renowned for Giselle, and it is this character's madness that dominates Act 2.
Osipova dances Tankard's delicately choreographed echoes of the original with inspired other-worldliness that is deeply touching. The beauty of her movement is not lost in the visible breaking down of her mind and body – all that training crumbling into physical incoherence. It is a magnificent performance.
Earlier, as a young Australian stumbling her way through dance lessons drawn from books, Osipova gives a credible impression of ungainliness. (How hard must that be for a ballerina?) Her humour is more subtle than Tankard's knockabout style of 30 years ago, which makes an interesting comparison.
Having followed Tankard's career through the strictures of the Australian Ballet and its flowering in the creativity of Pina Bausch's Wuppertaler Tanztheater and beyond, I probably had an advantage in picking up the twists and turns of this piece.
But I could sense a confusion in the audience. Although a free program gives details of the work, perhaps a spoken or written few words at the start might set the scene more clearly and loosen up the viewers' imaginations to make the most of the exceptional artistry on stage.
A lively selection of musical excerpts contributes enormously to the changing eras and moods of the show. Regis Lansac's visuals even more so, most memorably Giselle's haunting forest reflected in the water that floods the stage like tears. If only he had then let the human drama play out at the end and not superimposed a projection on the dancer's body.
Un Poyo Rojo (A Red Rooster) is wonderfully silly and seriously good. This male duo from Argentina uses body language to tell jokes and create characters of animals, birds and humans, macho and gay.
Alfonso Baron and Luciano Rossi have astonishingly supple bodies that they bring into play with moves that range from minuscule nudges to edgy acrobatic confrontations, stealing snippets of dance styles along the way. They are great to watch, very funny and deliciously naughty.
Out of Chaos … by the Adelaide group Gravity & Other Myths, is a worthy successor to its hit show Backbone, which was seen at the 2018 Sydney Festival.
The sophistication of their physical theatre reaches ever higher levels as the nine performers achieve seemingly impossible feats in building human towers and other edifices with no more than skill, training and absolute trust.
The lack of props and pretension sets them apart. Their bodies slide and bounce off each other, scale to dizzying heights on waiting shoulders, balance on heads or a single hand, whirl from one pair of arms to another … and it all looks entirely natural. Fabulous.
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