NORTH/SOUTH

Dancer Kimball Wong. Art Direction by Studio Band. Photo Sven Kovac

Australia Meets Norway in World Premiere by ADT

Double Bill | 11-14 September

Following Australian Dance Theatre‘s Helpmann-Award-winning work, The Beginning of Nature, they will be premiering their next work in ‘The Nature Series’ in Adelaide in September ⏤ North/South.

In an era which sees the climate in crisis, North/South unites two renowned choreographers, Garry Stewart and Ina Christel Johannessen, responding to the impact of climate change on the polar regions of our planet – the Arctic Circle and Antarctica – North/South is an extraordinary double bill.

Reflecting upon the most urgent issue of our times, this significant work premieres in Adelaide this September at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre from September 11-14.

When humans seek refuge in an enclosed space how is their behaviour shaped when lethal weather forces rage all around them? Ina Christel Johannessen’s North sees a collection of odd characters trapped in a shelter amidst an Arctic blizzard. As an artist living and working in the Arctic Circle, Johannessen has witnessed first-hand the rapid changes wrought by global warming and it’s emotional and psychological impacts on the people that live there. North explores the intimate and powerful exchange that plays out between humans and their environment.

Garry Stewart’s South depicts Sir Douglas Mawson’s fateful and dramatic journey to Antarctica as an allegory for our current predicament in the era of rapid global warming. Travelling from Adelaide to the Southern Continent in 1913, Mawson’s story is one of loss and vulnerability in an alien and forbidding landscape.

Premiering this September in ADT’s hometown of Adelaide, this is a unique collaboration that sees two legendary contemporary choreographers united to create a powerful new work of tragedy, loss and emotion.