Australian Dance Theatre’s A Quiet Language is built around five themes: people, politics, place, voice and body. This focus on place, in particular, is evident even before the performance begins, as we find our seats beneath screens displaying hills to the east, and ocean to the west. When musician and educator Jamie Goldsmith welcomes everyone to Kaurna land, he highlights the connection between land and language, and the knowledge embedded in place names we use every day. As Artistic Director Daniel Riley later comments, this year’s anniversary celebrations are about recognising not just 60 years of Australian Dance Theatre, but 60,000 years of art and storytelling by First Nations people.
In this milestone year for the company, the people who have shaped its past, and who will continue to expand its vision in future, are central to their creative approach. Works produced under Daniel Riley’s leadership are always intensely collaborative, and A Quiet Language, co-directed by Riley and Artistic Associate Brianna Kell, and choreographed by the Company Artists, is especially so. In developing this piece, the creative team spent four weeks with ADT’s founding director Elizabeth Cameron Dalman, revisiting some of her early repertoire, and learning about the artistic and political climate ADT was born into in the mid-1960s, echoes of which still play out today. This cultural heritage is acknowledged in the names of directors and dancers from decades past that scroll across the screens during the performance.
Another crucial collaborator on this project is the Adelaide-based musician Adam Page, whose distinctive, organic soundscape is a highlight of the show from the moment he steps barefoot under the stage lights, wielding his baritone sax. He performs live throughout, coaxing a world of sound from two saxophones, a loop pedal, and his expressive vocals. If echoes of the past are a key facet of A Quiet Language, they find their literal expression here in the reverberations Page captures with his looping machine, expanding and layering sounds to enhance their effect.
His music is in active conversation with the dancers’ movements. In one affecting sequence featuring Page and Zoe Wozniak, he produces eerie experiments in sound on the saxophone — the haunted quality of air rushing through its body without engaging the reed; the low patter of the keys opening and closing — to accompany Wozniak’s taut movements as she flexes hands and feet in corrugated shapes or pulls herself along by her own hair.
Australian Dance Theatre performer Sebastian Geilings. Photo: Morgan Sette / Supplied
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Of the five thematic pillars identified by Riley and his team, it is voice that most distinguishes A Quiet Language when compared with its predecessors. While its title might point to “an instinctual connection that is beyond words”, it is by far ADT’s most vocal work in recent memory, with the dancers themselves contributing guttural cries and strangled speech, clawing at their mouths and pressing the echoes to their ears. The only prop they use is a microphone, its black cable snaking like ink across the bare white stage, symbolising the clamour of debate — some of it a force for real change, some of it empty, vitriolic, or self-interested — that dominates our political landscape. The seating layout also reflects this theme, with the audience arranged on either side of the stage in a posture of dialogue.
If dance occasionally seems to take a backseat to the stellar soundscape, the central importance of embodied expression is reaffirmed when the piece reaches its crescendo. As Page lets loose on the baritone, the five untiring dancers fill the space with joyous, high-energy movement. Another distinguishing aspect of this work is its playful quality, noticeable particularly in the facial expressions of the performers, who wink, grin, and grimace at their audience. This direct engagement is infectious: by the end, we are smiling back at them.
A Quiet Language is fresh, full-bodied, and vital — a product of Riley’s philosophy of joy as resistance. There is no more fitting way for ADT to honour its groundbreaking legacy than with a work that pushes the company in new and exciting directions.
A Quiet Language is playing at the Odeon Theatre until 7 March as part of Adelaide Festival
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