BWW Reviews: Oz Asia Festival 2013: NOT ACCORDING TO PLAN Held the Audience in Awe

Reviewed Friday 20th September 2013

The multiple award winning company, Leigh Warren Dance, is a long established and highly respected Adelaide group that, earlier this year, was part of the prestigious Edinburgh Festival, and is also a recipient of a coveted Ruby Award, as well as several Adelaide Critics Circle awards. Choreographer, LeighWarren, makes a point of working collaboratively with other highly creative people whenever possible, and his dancers also have input to the work in its formative stages. His work is, therefore, constantly evolving and always full of fresh, new ideas.

This latest work, Not According to Plan, brings together an extremely creative group of people, resulting in a phenomenal production. Central to the work is the life of Xiao-Xiong Zhang, who also appears as a dancer singer and actor. The set design and construction is by Khai Liew, who is best known in Adelaide for the incredibly beautiful timber furniture that he makes, and some pieces made especially for this performance are used in the production. He also arranged for a large screen at the rear on which ink wash drawings and Chinese calligraphy, created on large sheet of rice paper by visual artist, Helen Fuller, are displayed. Alistair Trung is responsible for the costuming, that is so effective in enhancing the beauty of the movement of the dancers. Jerome Kugan wrote original music for the production, as well as drawing on the work of other composers to complete the sound design. Geoff Cobham, a regular contributor to theatre works in Adelaide, designed the striking lighting, a very important aspect of the performance.

That is an enormous amount of talent working behind the scenes in a concerted effort to create the environment in which the performance takes place, and it all looks far more stunning than I can describe. At the opening we find an abstract landscape, looking, if anything, somewhat like the surface of the moon. At a later point the huge covering is pulled back to reveal the timber constructions of Khai Liew, including a large oval coffee table, with an inset piece of egg shaped timber, a table that several people in the foyer afterwards expressed a very strong desire to own. A number of bifurcated cylindrical timber blocks, based on the design of temple blocks, completed the set.

Along with Xiao-Xiong Zhang, dancer, writer, poet, and teacher, are four other dancers, two from Adelaide, Rebecca Jones, who is a new dancer with Warren, and Aidan Munn, who was a founding member of the company twenty years ago, and two dancers who trained with Xiao-Xiong Zhang in Taiwan, Yuan-Li Wang, who has danced with Cloudstreet, and Chien-Wei Wu, who has worked with Beijing Dance.

With all of this immense talent involved it is of no surprise that this is an outstanding production that found the audience reluctant to go home until they had had sufficient time to stand and talk about it in detail, in the foyer following the performance.

Beginning in dim lighting, Xiao-Xiong Zhang enters the strange barren landscape and sits on a raised section. Two amorphous lumps beging to move, revealing themselves to be two of the dancers, Yuan-Li Wang and Chien-Wei Wu, each covered by a large, three sectioned cloth, the centre panel translucent, the outer panels in the deep burgundy that will be a feature of the costuming. The music for the first part was an electronic score, while the dancing was sensuous, and sensual, the first two dancers succeeded by Rebecca Jones and Aidan Munn. The dance in this section references those of Asia, and even suggests martial arts movements. When the covering is removed from the set at the end of the first section, to reveal all of the timber pieces, the music also changes, now featuring both Chinese and European instruments.

The intricacy of the movements, the marvellous solos, duos, and ensemble sections, Xiao-Xiong Zhang's relationships with the other four dancers in his dance, singing, and recitation, live and recorded, brings a wealth of exciting and absorbing performances with such great variety that it held the audience in thrall. There is just so much happening in this production, and all of it so captivating, that it leaves one wishing to see it again.

To try to describe the whole performance would take pages and, frankly, would never come close to conveying a fraction of what the audience experienced, so much of that being internal and profoundly moving. As with a number of performances in this Festival each year, there was a spiritual and meditative aspect to this magnificent production, and no words can convey that to a reader.
This production must surely be picked up by other States for future performances, and another run in Adelaide would allow those who missed out a chance to see it and, of course, a chance for those who attended the limited number of performances, a chance to see it again, as I am sure many would wish to do. If only the whole world could see this performance.

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