Glory

Phillip Adams Ballet Lab presents his new show Glory for Dance Massive at Temperance Hall in South Melbourne, involving a pastiche of dance, choreography and visual art that transcends into a uniquely aesthetically disruptive art performance. Adams is a pioneering Australian based conceptual performer, previously based in New York who has performed successfully across the globe, who established Ballet Lab in 1998.

Glory is a fascinating and bedazzling multidisciplinary performance, aptly performed in a quaintly eccentric space reflecting the French court of Versailles. Four dancers - Ben Hurley, Oliver Savariego, Rachael Wisby and Samuel Harnett-Welk - consummate, eloquent performers, deconstruct traditional ballet with a repetitive flappish movement, dressed in hot pink French poodle inspired costumes (The Huxleys), bounce with outrageous flair and poise to the mesmerizingly baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach. They move within and out of the space in unison and independently of each other give life to an exhilarating aesthetic conundrum that is a sheer joy to watch.

Adams, the fifth performer and central orchestrator, weaves within the space, masterfully navigating his three dimensional montage of aesthetic disciplines that include sculptural performance and a series of aesthetically inclined homo-erotic images that project a self-contained dreamlike subconscious ambience. His choice of monochromatic pink perpetually bathes the space and is a direct homage to Yves Klein’s Blue series (a French based performance art pioneer, whose life was tragically cut short when only in his early thirties). While Adams befittingly adheres to the Klein ideal of temporal transcendence to reach an abstraction, he is also clearly a master in his own right of cutting edge  art performance.

Flora Georgiou 

Photographer: Jeff Busby.