Adelaide Ballet’s first season arrives with real intent, with their debut work, Murray Whispers, taking the River Murray as both subject and stage, drawing from the place’s texture, wildlife and moods.
Co-founders Sarah Humeniuk and Rejane Garcia have the experience to pull this off. Humeniuk, with a career that has seen her work alongside icons like Margot Fonteyn and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Garcia, who brings her own distinct edge from Brazil.
It opens in haze, dancers stepping through early morning light. Behind them, Immersive Light and Art’s U-shaped sweep of floor-to-ceiling screens holds a day on the river: mist, heat shimmer, birds in flight, swans grooming themselves. By nightfall, the moon hangs over still water. It’s striking, immersive.
Ashley Hribar’s score is one to linger on: timpani rumbling like distant thunder, piano lines that wander and circle back, brass flourishes, and a cheeky spring of sound for kangaroos.
The choreography and the score seem to breathe together. Bodies run like water, skim like birds, rooted into tree-shapes in the background to make room for duos and solos.
All four dancers, Aki Pargaliti, Elia Noon, Jackeline Valente and Mathew Jordan, find their place in the current. Noon’s solos have a calm, magnetic quality; she holds herself with a balance that marks her out as someone to watch. Pargaliti, too, shapes her moments with clarity.
The camouflage summer dresses, by designer Kira Bayliss and maker Alice Ong, deserve their own applause: soft fabrics that seem to soak in the landscape, letting the dancers dissolve into the river scenes instead of breaking them.
Our River Murray is a rich ecosystem that has evolved over an eternity. As an ecosystem in its infancy, Adelaide Ballet is already thriving in the areas of choreography, music and performance.
The back end, such as lighting, and how the screens work with the action, still has room to grow, and this will come as familiarity grows with the technology and the space.
The staging sometimes hides the dancers in shadow or flattens the sight lines from the back rows, which is a pity when ballet’s full lines and shapes matter so much. The screens could do more than set the scene; they could help tell it, as New Zealand-based dancer Eliza Sanders managed so deftly at this year’s Adelaide Fringe.
While some segments, such as the dawn, dusk and evening scenes, are clearly reflected in the dance, music and the screens, several dramatic shifts occur which are not reflected on the screens; clouds may appear, but the sound and movement are suggestive of wild storms, for example.
For a first outing, though, Murray Whispers feels both rooted and ambitious; a statement that Adelaide Ballet is a company serious about weaving South Australian stories into the bones of their art.
Murray Whispers runs from 15 to 17 August at ILA, Immersive Light & Art, 63 Light Square Adelaide SA 5000.
Tickets: https://immersivelightandart.com.au/event/murray-whispers-adelaide-ballet/
Website: https://www.adelaideballet.com.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/adlballet/
Photo credits: Alexander Waite Mitchell
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