Don’t try and work it out because ADC’s Aftermath is compellingly confounding

This intense 60 minute workout is one of the most compelling performances I have ever witnessed, writes Phil Brown.

Fwd: Australasian Dance Collective - Aftermath

Hey everybody, I’ve just been to my first rave! Better late than never I guess.

The rave is actually a contemporary dance show called Aftermath and it’s on now at Brisbane Powerhouse.

It features Brisbane’s own Australasian Dance Collective (ADC) in a production that could just as easily have been done in a warehouse space in London or New York where it would almost certainly be a hit.

With muso Danny Harley (aka The Kite String Tangle) centre stage driving a console that looks like something from a sci-fi movie (there are moments when it sounds like the Tardis warming up) this is a pumping, edgy and exciting piece of dance with no frills.

Danny Harley drives his console as the ADC dancers work the wall of the Powerhouse Theatre in Aftermath

There’s no set besides the fabulous bare wall of the Powerhouse Theatre with its post industrial patina. And there’s no story as such, no clear narrative although it’s clear that something has happened in this world and the dancers are somehow trying to come to grips with it.

What’s the feel? Well put it this way ....you wouldn’t be surprised to see Arnold Schwarzenegger drive on stage on his Harley-Davidson and say ... “Come with me if you want to live.” Are you with me?

There is an urgency in the moves but occasionally they are languid but much of the time frantic.

This dance work is a collaboration between two choreographers - Amy Hollingsworth, artistic director of ADC and Jack Lister and they have given us some hints as to their thinking in the notes in the program.

“Can you begin at the start if you don’t know where it ends?,” they ask, saying then that, in the work “a collection of perspectives piece together a story we think we know, everyone’s truth of events transpired, memories placed, amassed, rearranged, shattered. Moving through a world of disquiet, between calm and chaos, we accelerate towards total recall. Cause, consequences, action, reaction, Aftermath.”

Ya dig? No, I didn’t think so.

Moving like they mean it - ADC dancers revel in Aftermath

The thing is you had to be there and you should be there because this intense 60 minute workout is one of the most compelling performances I have ever witnessed. And Danny Harley, whose music I didn’t know, is the maestro at the centre of it all with his booming soundscape. It’s very loud and insistent and if this was forty something years ago he’d be called Mike Oldfield.

He looks like a cross between Plastic Bertrand and Darth Vader and obviously has his own fan base and some of them were there last night for the opening show. How do I know? Well I can spot a contemporary dance fan and these dudes weren’t. Although they probably are now.

The dancers were terrific individually but where necessary they abandoned that individuality and moved as one as the beat went on.

What can I tell you? It was wild. And I’m hip now because I have finally been to a rave. Of sorts. Cool.

Aftermath is on at Brisbane Powerhouse until this Sunday February 14; brisbanepowerhouse.org