More than two years in the making, Aviary is a collaboration with the Australian Ballet, featuring classically trained performers and contemporary dancers from the Balletlab troupe. While Adams has chosen the structure of the suite, a classical form conventionally employed in ballet and opera, his approach is anything but traditional. He’s stormed in like a self-described “terrorist to the mothership of the conservative bourgeoisie” with the aim to “enlighten and enrage audiences at the same time”.
Aviary was inspired by the work of Olivier Messiaen, a French composer and ornithologist whose orchestral arrangements were often based on birdsong. Adams also references ballet’s rich history of bird imagery, if only to tear this history to pieces and stitch it together anew. In part one ‘The Cage’, dancers improvise to Messiaen scores that are pasted to the ground. Unable to read musical notation, they instead translate these hieroglyphics into wild gestures interpreting the physical quavers, crotchets and semibreves that lay before them.
Utilising Adams’ background in music, he and sound designer David Franzke have created a fittingly ornate score. They recorded birdsong at daybreak in the botanical gardens, and consulted with an ornithologist from the University of Melbourne.
While Adams’ unique approach to choreography carries through his oeuvre, Aviary seems to be a particularly personal work. The show is something of a homecoming for Adams, in several senses. This will be his first time on the stage in ten years, the suite’s three parts traveling through the locales of his past – part two, ‘The Dandy’, revisits the 80s nightclubs of Adams’ heyday; part three, ‘The Nest’, returns to Papa New Guinea where he spent his youth, exploring what he describes as the “childhood reflective trance” of growing up in the jungle.
But it is perhaps the flamboyancy of our feathered friends that most attracted Adams to make a show about them – an exhibitionism that he, as a performer, refuses to be ashamed of. “There’s always a thread or hint of queer sensibility to my work,” Adams explains. “It’s part of who I am, and that will be made known in Aviary when I return to the stage… I can’t think of a better way than to parade myself around – think dandy, the exotic bird strutting himself on the disco floor of bears [the gay subculture, not the grizzly].
“I thought if I’m going to do this, if I’m going to come back and out myself up there for the public after ten years of being away, I want to be honest…I want to be able to say, well, this is who I am now at [age] 46”.
Designer Toni Maticevski and milliner Richard Nylon have created cast costumes that are appropriately extravagant. Yet these outfits too are all Adams, blending the post-punk style of his salad days with the bird imagery of ballet, with maximum wow factor. Imagine mohawks made from exotic bird feathers, alongside liberal lashings of leather and tulle. These couture creations opened this year’s Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, to rave reviews. “As Danni Minogue said to me, ‘Wow, what a brilliant opening… I’ve never seen anything like that in my life!'” boasts Adams. When asked if the costumes are constrictive to dance in, Adams laughs. “Yeah, lots, and we love it! It’s part of the fashionable experience of this piece”.
The avian motif has also been carried over into the set design. In part three, aptly-named architect Matthew Bird has created six foot “nests” inspired by the bowerbirds of Papa New Guinea. Known for their blue fetishism, male bowerbirds collect hundreds of objects to create elaborate nests designed to seduce their potential partners. Bird has mimicked the bowerbird’s process with recycled materials, albeit with an anachronistic aesthetic. “There’s kind of 50s and 60s patterns that are repeated all over these six foot structures, like Mayan temples,” says Adams.
Finding a shared vision, Bird and Adams have already started planning their next collaboration. Working with students from RMIT and Monash University, the duo are developing a site-specific performance work in which the audience are invited to help build “a perfect utopian environment”, before a dance piece takes place in their construction at the end. This reflects what Adams hopes will be the future direction of Balletlab, creating works that are as much about visual art as they are about performance.
For an artist like Adams, the creative process never stops. He’s about to start work on another project with artist Michaela Dwyer called Thumb, scheduled for 2013, which will explore economies of scale. But he believes it’s only in this chapter of his life that he’s begun making his best work. “I think I’ve been through the phases of feeling like I have to make the next cool dance thing… Now I think I’ve let all of that go and am allowing myself to trust my own instinct.
“But I’m the kind of artist who will always be saying my best work is yet to come,” he laughs. “I’ll die making my next best work, hopefully!”
