Garry Stewarts «Devolution» mit dem Australian Dance Theatre

Australian Dance Theatre’s artistic director Garry Stewart garnered an impressive list of collaborators for “Devolution,” commissioned as one of the centerpieces of the 2006 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Jointly credited to Stewart and Louis-Philippe Demers, an ex-NASA French-Canadian robotics designer, the work also draws on the expertise of taxidermist-turned-costume designer Georg Meyer-Wiel, composer Darrin Verhagen, and film-maker Gina Czarnecki.

Partly because of this noteworthy line-up, partly because of the intriguing nature of its theme of human and machine, and partly because of the unusual amount of government funding it had attracted, “Devolution” generated a great deal of anticipation in local arts circles even before its premiere. It did not disappoint. If anything, “Devolution” exceeded my expectations.

From the opening film sequence, projected onto an enormous screen that extended beyond the proscenium, until the heart-thumpingly exciting finale, I was transfixed. Czarnecki’s black and white film projections, which begin and end the piece and occur at intervals throughout, are the most beautiful uses of film in dance I have witnessed. Bodies multiply and morph, ...