Playhouse Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, May 26, 2021

Amy Hollingsworth’s relief was palpable and profound. THREE had finally arrived. It was 14 months late, but it was here. The triple bill of two new works and an important Australian premiere was to have introduced Hollingsworth’s Australasian Dance Collective to the Brisbane public last year on April 1 (yes, April 1). It had to be pulled only two weeks before opening as COVID-19 forced the closure of theatres around Australia. The blow was felt keenly by all performing arts companies but was particularly tough on ADC, just about to launch itself on the world. 

ADC isn’t precisely a new company but it is a changed one. In late 2018 Hollingsworth was appointed artistic director of the long-established Expressions Dance Company and started work in January 2019. As is the way of things, the 2019 season was chiefly the work of Hollingsworth’s predecessor, Natalie Weir. Hollingsworth’s stamp would be imprinted on the 2020 program, and it would be an emphatic one. In November 2019 it was announced that EDC would become Australian Dance Collective, a name later quietly tweaked to Australasian Dance Collective. 

That’s the history. Now for the present and the future. When Hollingsworth first announced THREE she said it would be a template for annual mixed bills that would bring together a local or younger artist, an established Australian dancemaker and an international work. This first iteration features the fast-rising Brisbane choreographer Jack Lister, who is also an ADC dancer (and associate choreographer at his former company, Queensland Ballet); the thrilling and in-demand Melbourne-based artist Melanie Lane; and superstar Hofesh Shechter, with whom Hollingsworth danced many years ago. It’s a formidable group and an exciting program.

Lane’s Alterum, which opens THREE, begins with a struggle. A woman (Chase Clegg-Robinson) is alone, in silence. She crawls and writhes in the misty light, seeming to want to stand but being unable to do so. Or perhaps this is what she prefers, for now. Her body is alert – you can almost see the atoms vibrate – and elastic, although it’s not a loose kind of elasticity. The level of control is ferocious. Lane is fascinated by the superhuman capabilities of the body but what makes her work affecting rather than merely impressive is that she is also supremely sensitive to how society – life, really – affects that body and that mind. While her work may look very strange at first, its power lies in the reach towards something more than the ordinary.  

Clegg-Robinson is soon joined by others, at first seen bathed in red light as if the zombie apocalypse has arrived. Clark’s intensely layered electronic score starts up and we’re off. Six bodies huddle, shudder and shuffle. They are often jittery with bobbing heads and tiny little robotic steps. Sometimes they form a militaristic-looking pack and then lean back as if recoiling from what they are about to see or do, or have done to them. They arrange themselves into couples and trios and fracture again. There are touches of unison, some images of tender support and others of attack. It is exhilarating.

Alterum is a Latin word meaning “other”, and it’s a perfect word for Lane’s ability to conjure the mysteriousness of being and the desire – don’t we all have it from time to time? – to be something else, whether alone or with others. 

THREE ends with Shechter’s short, sharp Cult. It was made in 2004, a couple of years before Shechter formed his eponymous company, and was his first group piece. Cult, also for six performers, has many of the markers of Shechter’s later work: provocative text delivered in voiceover, reminders of our mortality, intimations of folk dance in the movement, a strong sense of life as communal rather than individual, and tightly wound bodies and minds.

Here Shechter’s interest is in group dynamics and pressures. How, for instance, should you read the brief moment when one of the men throws his arms around the shoulders of the other two and walks away with them, his grasp tight? Are they friends from way back, or is this coercion? There is, however, no ambiguity about the final minutes, in which Lister separates from the group but ultimately has to return to it, somewhat cowed. There are many such moments in just 15 minutes of stage time. Cult is utterly absorbing and, alas, over in a flash.

Lister’s Still Life is the quiet, introspective buffer between the more muscular Lane and Shechter. While Still Life is nothing like Cult, there are some links. Like Shechter, Lister has death on his mind but in a less visceral way. For Shechter death, possibly sooner rather than later, is a brutal given. Lister takes a more philosophical view, going to art history for inspiration and taking the long view.

Like Shechter, Lister’s dancers (he is also in the cast) are presented as everyday people in everyday clothes – in Cult the men wear suits and the women simple dresses, all identical as you might expect from the work’s name; in Still Life each person is an individual. Still Life has a vestigial set, a square panel with a smaller square cut-out at its centre by which Lister evokes an art gallery and its associations. Love and human existence may be fleeting but great works of art can last for centuries, an idea Lister links to art that takes as its theme the transience of human existence.

Lister has selected music by Mozart, Bellini and Chopin to accompany a series of vignettes touching on longing and loss. They are understandable choices but there are times when the music, so familiar and lovely, overshadows the dance. Making a work about the evanescence of life and yes, dance itself, is a tricky business and Lister doesn’t manage to make everything in this half-hour piece feel necessary to his overarching idea. The performances are involving, though, and there is a gorgeous duo for Lonii Garnons-Williams and Tyrel Dulvarie in which they barely touch but move and breathe together in glorious harmony.

ADC is a small company with only six dancers, all of whom appeared in each work. It’s an heroic achievement from a splendid group of artists whose collective experience is worth noting. Josephine Weise was previously with Sydney Dance Company where she worked with a wide array of top-flight choreographers, Jack Lister brings his Australian Ballet School and Queensland Ballet experience to the mix and Jag Popham trained in New Zealand and last year worked with Lloyd Newson on the thrilling revival of Enter Achilles. Chase Clegg-Robinson is a young Brisbane dancer at the start of her career. She was an ADC apprentice last year and took part in Stephanie Lake’s Colossus in early 2020. Lonii Garnons-Williams has vast experience as a freelance artist with many leading Australian companies and was for a time a member of Australian Dance Theatre. And the newest ADC member is the charismatic Tyrel Dulvarie. He was formerly with Bangarra Dance Theatre where he shone, and he shines here. 

Brisbane is very lucky to have them. 

THREE ends on May 29.