CriticalDance Forum

Birdbrain is the brainchild of Australian Dance Theatre's Garry Stewart. I liked this piece. Swan Lake has never been my favourite ballet, and when someone like Stewart takes it apart and puts it together in such a way that engages a 21st century audience and allows them to really question the power of the Swan, well surely that's good art. I would recommend this dance to anybody who was a bit of a ballet school rebel and definitely to anyone suffers from Swan envy.

It is the post-modern, ironic, self-refernetial commentary of the iconography of Swan Lake and the Swans that Stewart bases Birdbrain on. It is clever subject matter for a dance, but not necessarily witty, and sometimes I felt he was trying to hard too achieve the latter, it comes across as an attempt at ironic wit that falls flat. That aside - ADT's dancers were something else. They absolutely tore up the floorboards on opening night by bursting with energy, athleticism and kinetic intensity. I was particularly impressed by the performance given by Kristina Chan whose solo appeared to reference 'The Black Swan'. Larissa McGowan's solo, which could have been read as 'The Dying Swan', was also fantastically danced.

All the dancers had gorgeous lines (and hair), perfect control of their bodies and could execute the "fast, aggressive and technically demanding" choreography with such ease, it might make Louise Lecavalier raise her eyebrows.

There, I've done it, I've brought Louise Lecavalier of La La La Human Steps into the mix. I do it for a reason, and that is while Stewart is busy smashing apart the Diva attitude that goes hand in hand with being a Swan, he unwittingly strives for and pays homage to another kind of Diva, that of the 'too cool for school' aesthetic of La La La Human Steps, an aesthetic that could be the ripped apart and parodied in a post-post modern way a century from now.

Birdbrain is on at the QEH Wed 7 & Thu 8.

Thanks for your review Christine. Here is another one from The Guardian.

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Birdbrain
By Debra Craine for The Times


THE Australian choreographer Garry Stewart has a novel take on Swan Lake. He’s interested in the bits audiences don’t usually think about, those prosaic questions you don’t ask when the poetry is working. How do those lovely women actually turn into swans? What goes on in their bodies? Does it hurt? And what happens after the desperate lovers throw themselves into the lake? Is it all over?

Birdbrain is the product of those questions (looking between the crevices, Stewart calls it), a fast, furious and sometimes funny deconstruction of Swan Lake told in breakdancing, ballet, martial arts, gymnastics and video projection. It was brought to London by Australian Dance Theatre this week.

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Review from The Independent.

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Dang! Another great show I've missed. Given its success here, I guess it may well come back.

Birdbrain
By David Dougill in The Sunday Times.

At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Australian Dance Theatre, on its first London visit for many years, presented Birdbrain, by the director-choreographer Garry Stewart — a curious, intermittently compelling essay in deconstructing Swan Lake, performed to thumping techno music with occasional incursions of Tchaikovsky.

Here again, there is a blend of dance styles — ballet movement, segueing into gymnastics and break dance, all done with fierce attack by a company of great strength and stamina. They are also adept at the quick-changing of white T-shirts labelled with the names of Swan Lake’s characters, and also concepts — such as “peasant joy”, “more pointless revelry”, “despair”, “doom”, even “drama queen”.

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