BLKDOG and Six Years Later | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

Works by choreographers Botis Seva and Roy Assaf formed this Sadler’s Well Double Bill live streamed from the UK.

BLKDOG by Botis Seva. Picture: Camilla Greenwell

BLKDOG and Six Years Later

Dance / UK

FESTIVAL

Her Majesty’s Theatre

March 6

The big experiment in the 2021 Adelaide Festival was the announcement of a number of live-streamed performances from other parts of the world. Would the audiences come? Would the technology work? The answer, fortunately, appears to have been a resounding yes.

After all, it isn’t every day that you get to see Natalia Osipova, arguably the world’s finest living dancer, on stage in an exquisite duet, or Botis Seva, the single hottest property in the small international group of emerging choreographers.

We last saw Osipova in Adelaide two years ago in the triumphant recreation of Meryl Tankard’s Two Feet, her 1988 work in which first Tankard herself, and 30 years later Osipova, played one of the early 20th century’s greatest ballerinas, the Russian Olga Spessivtzeva. This time it was Six Years Later from the Israeli Roy Assaf, a work from 2016 which Osipova and the equally impressive dancer Jason Kittelberger have very much made their own.

Six Years Later live stream at Her Majesty's Theatre. Part of the Sadler's Well Double Bill for the Adelaide Festival 2021.

This blissful piece, just shy of 30 minutes, is an extended meditation on relationships, past, present, and surely future. Osipova and Kittelberger are a pair on and off stage, and in this piece the intensity of the partnership worked a treat, every nuance so convincing. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in various permutations formed the lion’s share of an eclectic score that underpinned the twists and turns of an enduring partnership.

The filming of the piece, with multiple cameras, was of the highest standard, affording multiple angles and a birds-eye view of even the tiniest details. It was sheer beauty.

Botis Seva’s BLKDOG, written for his Far From The Norm ensemble, is a darker work entirely. Gritty hardly comes close, as the five-strong ensemble of hooded characters prowl around the stage, seemingly desperate for something, anything, to relieve the deathly boredom of wasted, wasting lives. Seva speaks of the work as a reflection on the hopelessness and fear of urban black youth, and it is surely very convincing.

BLKDOG live stream at Her Majesty's Theatre. Picture: Andrew Beveridge

Among the many lingering memories of this electrifying piece are the precise alignment of the movement with the score, an amazing work in its own right from Torben Lars Sylvest, and the frequent positioning of the dancers down on their haunches, skittering along like insects, in a feat of strength whose simple appearance belies a formidable physical and technical challenge.

The multiple cameras and extremely high quality of the sound – to the extent of spatial effects being perfectly reproduced – was an added benefit. A technical glitch – it had to happen – was not the showstopper it might have been, as it meant we had the privilege of seeing the first part of the piece twice.