Review: WAYFINDER – ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2024 at Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ray Smith, Friday 15th March 2024.

The performance of Wayfinder, by Dancenorth Australia, at the Space Theatre, was delayed by 30 minutes, so I and the gathering masses had time for another glass of something before the show began.

As we entered the performance space to this general admission show, it was curious to see some white spheres, about the size of a rockmelon, placed apparently randomly on some of the available seats. I avoided them. The dimly lit auditorium was illuminated by a sphere, similar to the ones on some of the seats, glowing in the lap of a cross-legged figure in the centre of the stage. All lights went down and the now familiar recorded 'welcome to country' was played, as it had at all the Festival shows that I had attended, save the Australian Dance Theatre's show earlier in the week, which featured a much more personal and heartfelt welcome from a local Aboriginal elder.

The stage lights went up and a group of brightly dressed dancers were visible on a stage surface raised about 500mm above the floor. A disco-like beat exploded into the air and the dancers took off with an enormous burst of energy, as the spheres sitting on the laps of some of the audience members began to glow.

The frenzy of movement ended as abruptly as it had started, and the dancers, now huddled centre stage, were covered by a pile of coloured fibre ropes that fell from the roof above them. A solo piano replaced the urgent beats, and they began to dance, with the fibres hurling them across the space and off the raised pad to within a metre of the front-row seats. As the fibres were being tossed into the air, strobe lighting from both sides of the stage flickered the scene into a surreal spectacle of stop motion; it was extraordinarily effective.

One dancer became entangled in the fibres, his peers piling more and more of the colourful threads onto his writhing body, finally rolling him and the threads around the stage until he became the tangled head of a rainbow-bright snake. Leaving him lying head towards the audience, the other dancers retreated from view and the lone dancer released himself and began to climb down the twisted rope before beginning an immensely physical solo routine that saw him seeming to defy gravity, bouncing from the soft raised surface of the stage with impossible fluidity.

I was breathless from watching this performance, when he began to slowly climb back up the rope to form the head of the snake again, concluding his implied ascent by lying on his back and beating the time of the steady drum beats of the soundscape by flinging his arms out sideways onto the soft stage surface.

The other dancers slowly crawled onto the stage and, one by one, lay on their backs, their heads upon the chest and belly of the dancer before them, and joined the beating of time in superb synchronisation, their arms forming stationary arcs as they bounced from the floor. It was formally very beautiful, and looked for all the world like a centipede lying on its back, its legs forming soft arcs between each beat.

At one stage, as the dancers appeared carrying woven figures with more illuminated globes held in nets like fishing floats, distant voices are heard in soft oohs and aahs within the soundscape, and those sounds were emanating from the globes in the audience as their light ebbed and flowed in the laps of the astonished crowd. The person sitting next to me held her globe to her chest, her eyes closed in delight as it softly sang to her, its light brightening and dimming like a living thing.

The woven object is suspended from the roof like a totem pole and a dancer slowly crawls away from it pulling several coloured threads with her, fanning out in her wake. When she reaches the corner of the stage those stretched threads begin to be agitated by the other dancers, forming bright undulating waveforms punctuated and held by the strobe lighting. This was an enormously sophisticated work.

A new element was added, as a wall was suddenly raised, made of the same springy material as the dance floor, the dancers bounced from it, some clambering over it and sliding to the floor like skinks, before raising it over their heads revealing its bright underside and a dancer on top dancing joyfully, ecstatically, her delight totally infectious. Coloured threads are pulled from the stage, one end handed to members of the audience, connecting us to the dance, to the colour, to the sheer joy of this wonderful performance.

The standing ovation from the packed house came as no surprise to anyone.

Dancenorth's use of props and technology in this production was breathtaking, and while their extremely high-energy performances are always wonderful to watch, this show was a technological and visual tour de force.

Photography, Amber Haines.