King of the Power Kick

Seven years ago the stage was set for the premiere of Birdbrain, choreographer Garry Stewart's first work for Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide. The new artistic director had opted for a contemporary version of Swan Lake, and when a video screen on stage displayed the word begin, nothing could have prepared the audience for the dance explosion that ensued as the worlds of ballet and techno music collided. Stewart's dancers deconstructed the story of Prince Siegfried and his dying swan Odette in T shirts wittily printed with words such as doom, lust, sieg and fried. But more amazing was the way they moved, break-dancing from en pointe to contortionism in a choreography that really flew.

Over 250 performances later, Birdbrain has become a classic of contemporary dance, catapulting the company onto the world stage, including the hallowed Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, where last year ADT became the first Australian troupe invited to perform. "Dance in Europe had been dominated by very conceptual work that was physically very minimalist," explains Stewart, 44, "and we came crashing through with Birdbrain, which is completely maximalist from a movement point of view." From Feb. 20, at Sadler's Wells in London, the extremely muscular choreographer has the chance to further shift perceptions of the body and how it should move through space when he presents the company's 2004 work, HELD. A collaboration with U.S. dance photographer Lois Greenfield, the work pits Stewart's so-called kamikaze choreography against still images captured and projected by Greenfield live on stage, cleverly playing with the way movement is registered in the mind's eye of an audience.

But that's only an appetizer for what dance-goers in Spain, Slovenia and France can expect later this year, when ADT presents its latest and most maximalist work thus far. In the wake of a season at the Sydney Festival, Devolution pushes Stewart's high-voltage style to bursting point, pitting man against machine, muscle against metal. For this, the Adelaide-based choreographer has worked with Montreal "roboticist" Louis-Philippe Demers to engineer a fleet of moving machines that interact with ADT's 10 dancers on stage. By the end, performers don computer-programmed prosthetics in a dystopian dance with a visual style reminiscent of Mad Max. At a time when contemporary choreography so often underwhelms, Devolution has the wow factor, even if its message about life in a computerized age is darker and more ambiguous.

During the work's three-year gestation, Stewart gradually warmed to Demers' motorized monsters and was "devastated" when two of the creatures broke down just before the Jan. 24 opening in Sydney. "It's interesting because it was a similar response to having a really good dancer suddenly having to go off with an injury," he recalls. Illuminated, stalked and interrogated by the machines, Stewart's dancers are cast in a new light, with primordial movements evoking the dawn of mankind. "Even though we've lived under civilization for millennia," Stewart says, "we are still very much driven by our bodies, by instinct."

Since taking the artistic reins of ADT in 1999, Stewart's own instincts have been unerring. Then a freelance choreographer and former dancer, his name was less well-known than that of Meryl Tankard, his high-flying predecessor, who had exited from the company after creative clashes with the board. In his 1995 piece for the Melbourne Festival, Spectre in the Covert Memory, Stewart had already begun his choreographic experiments with strength and power, and at ADT he would take this further, training his young troupe in yoga, martial arts and gymnastics. While Tankard's dancers were known for sailing through the air on ropes, Stewart's seem to defy gravity wholly unassisted. "One of the hallmarks of my work is that I manage to push dancers above and beyond their own expectations," Stewart says. "I certainly get the most out of dancers, and empower them to do things that they possibly didn't think they could do."

Brought up on a property near Forbes in central western New South Wales, Stewart left school to study social work in Sydney, where he discovered ballet at the relatively late age of 19. His professional trajectory began with two years at the Australian Ballet School, but the seeds had been sown back on the family farm. "Even before I started dancing," he recalls, "I used to listen to music and imagine bodies flying through space." For how much longer at ADT, one can only surmise. Stewart was recently mentioned as a possible successor to Graeme Murphy at the Sydney Dance Company, but with ADT commitments taking him well into 2008, he is so far keeping mum. "I had a journalist ring me up and say, 'I've heard you've got the SDC job,' " he recalls. "I said, 'I must check my e-mail; I haven't heard about that.'" More certain is that his next work for ADT will hit the spot. To be called G, it looks to deconstruct the romantic ballet Giselle, and one can foresee his heartbroken peasant girl being transported to the moonlit land of Wilis with maximum G force.