When I was 11 years old, I saw my father crash a motorcycle on a country road. I remember seeing him fly through the air in slow motion, finally hitting the ground. Time stood still. The action seemed to take half an hour. In reality, it was only one-and-a-half seconds.
Amplification, the first full length work by dancer and choreographer Phillip Adams, attempts to stretch out the time interval of a crash over three acts. Even so, it’s all over in 45 minutes.
Each of the three acts focuses on sound, body and light as different forms of amplification. Each act has a death, a burial and a ritual.
Adams describes Amplification as “not theatre, but installing dance into a format that we haven’t seen before.
“After viewing crash test dummies as a kid [I thought] there could be a moment there, where I could look at the body in a new way . . . I’m good at creating a fake environment for the body . . . making it do the most outrageous things,” he says.
Much of the research for this piece was done at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne. Adams visited the morgue and also spoke with car crash survivors in the intensive care unit.
“They were so helpful,” Adams says. “People like talking about this stuff.”
In addition, the dancers spent a period of time being ejected from cars and projected against airbags in order to learn the “vocabulary” of the body’s reactions to extreme stress.
All of this would suggest that Amplification is not for the faint-hearted. Feedback from rehearsals suggests that audience reactions may be polarised.
Adams, who describes himself as avant-garde rather than postmodern, played the Big Bad Wolf in Chunky Move’s most recent production, BODYPARTS. He has spent most of the last decade performing in New York and has returned to Australia with a determination to do his own thing.
Amplification, which opens at the Athenauem [theatre in Melbourne] next Thursday [9 September 1999], is also the debut production for Adams’ new dance company, BalletLab. His company will join Chunky Move, Dance House and other Melbourne companies, who are all competing for money in an increasingly corporate enviuronment.
“It’s the six-week syndrome — you get funding, you make a piece and it’s seen once,” Adams says. Luckily for him, Amplification plays Melbourne and will then travel to Sydney, Glasgow and London.
Adams makes no bones about the fact that BalletLab is aiming for the international market, a prospect he finds exhilarating and scary at the same time.
His self-promotional activities tread a fine line between sensationalism (nudity on stage is a marketing ploy, he admits) and serious artistic endeavour.
“In some ways, it’s about marketing and that’s sad — Is it art anymore?
“But it comes down to money. We need money to eat and survive . . . So, I don’t feel guilty at all about government funding.”
This article first appeared in The Melbourne Times on 1 September 1999.