Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Saturday 7th March 2015
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet presented their second performance in the Festival Theatre, following the very successful first production last night, Mixed Rep. Again, the house was full of people of all ages, eagerly waiting for the performance to begin.
Neuroanatomist, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, suffered a stroke and later wrote her book, My Stroke of Insight
: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, telling of the experience. She also appeared in a TED talk and some of that is used as part of the background for this performance,
Orbo Novo (New World), created by Flemish choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. As well as using her own words, the dancers also work to music by Szymon Brzóska, performed by the Mosaic String Quartet. The dancers pick up the text, One beginning, then others joining in, passing the text around, then silently moving their mouths when the recording cuts in again. They accompany the text with stylised movements, larger than life.
Alexander Dodge's set is a collection of large, heavy, red lattice panels, hinged together in groups, and mounted on castors, which the performers move around to create many different structures, as well as pushing them aside to create a larger working space. The square gaps in the lattice looked small but, with the entire group together not having the tiniest bit of fat between them, they were all able to pass through the lattices. These lattices become a feature of the dance, not just a background to it.
It often forms a barrier between dancers, in the way the medial longitudinal fissure separates the left and right hemispheres of the brain, with the dancers climbing to and fro between the two halves, like signals travelling along the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that bridge the fissure. They climb all over the lattice, through it, are locked in, or out by it, and, at the end, all but one escapes it, representing, perhaps, that recovery from a stroke is not always complete.
The work has a combination of smaller sections, for one, two, or three dancers, right up to full ensemble sections. There was more floor work than we saw the previous night, and such a wide range of movement, from gentle, subtle interactions through to enormously energetic moments, and numerous movements from the classical ballet. The dancers are technically superb, accurate and precise in following the choreographer and tightly linked in the unison and canon passages. It was a remarkable work with, some highly emotionally charged moments, but there were some other times that didn't connect quite as well with the audience, in spite of quality of the dancing.
This work is performed by the entire company: Patrick Coker,
Jon Bond,
Nickemil Concepcion, Vânia Doutel Vaz, Joseph Kudra, Navarra Novy-Williams, Raymond Pinto, Guillaume Quéau, Matthew Rich, Ida Saki, Joaquim de Santana, Rachelle Scott, Ebony Williams, Jin Young Won and Madeline Wong. They and the choreographers, as well as all of the others involved, have every right to be pleased with what they presented to the Adelaide audiences.
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