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Adelaide embraces raw dance work

Canadian contemporary dance-theatre production Betroffenheit has become the second Adelaide Festival show to sell out ahead of the 2017 event.

Jan 17, 2017, updated Jan 17, 2017
Betroffenheit is a hybrid dance-theatre work. Photo: Michael Slobodian

Betroffenheit is a hybrid dance-theatre work. Photo: Michael Slobodian

Presented by Electric Company Theatre and Kidd Pivot dance company, Betroffenheit (which translates as “sadness” or “consternation”) has its roots in tragedy and human suffering.

The work was created by Kidd Pivot choreographer Crystal Pite in collaboration with Electric Company writer and performer Jonathon Young, whose young daughter was killed alongside two of her cousins in a cabin fire on a family holiday.

“We are so delighted that Adelaide has embraced this remarkable work,” Adelaide Festival co-artistic director Neil Armfield said.

“Crystal Pite is a prodigious new talent on the international dance scene and the standing ovations and breath-taking critical response this work has received across the globe is evidence of her technical virtuosity and her very human response to Jonathan Young’s harrowing personal journey.”

There will be two two-hour performances at the Dunstan Playhouse on the opening weekend of the Adelaide Festival in March.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9MzKFFiwuU

Ahead of the Festival program release last year, Armfield’s fellow artistic director, Rachel Healy, said Betroffenheit was “not about grief, it’s not about sadness, it’s not about loss … it’s a physical theatre experience of what it is to be in a state of trauma”.

Tickets to all four performances of the 2017 Adelaide Festival’s centrepiece show, Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed operatic work Saul, sold out in early December.

The Festival said tickets were also selling fast to its other dance shows: Israeli company L-E-V’s OCD Love and Killer Pig, French choreographer Jérôme Bel’s Gala and Adelaide company Restless Dance Theatre’s Intimate Space.

Adelaide Fringe is also reporting strong interest in its 2017 program, with ticket sales to date around 5 per cent up on the same time last year.

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