Experimental art takes the cake (of soap) at Adelaide Festival

Barrie Kosky’s The Magic Flute was the big-ticket item.

The opening weekend of this year's Adelaide Festival was vivid and eclectic and full of surprises. The experimental edges offered novel ideas and the main stages swelled with grandeur across every art form.

Barrie Kosky’s production of The Magic Flute was the hot-ticket item that any opera lover would travel interstate to see. Backed by the high-modernist animations of 1927, it was a surreal storybook come to life, complete with cartoon dragons and moths, giant spiders and masonic conspiracies, all sung to perfection by a talented international cast.

Meryl Tankard’s Two Feet, performed by Russian prima ballerina Natalia Osipova, excavated the cruelty and madness of the form through the story of Olga Spessivtseva, a famed Giselle who suffered her first bout of insanity on an Australian tour in the 1930s. Osipova’s compelling presence, expressive clowning and virtuosic artistry staggered in parts, though difficulties with blocking and lighting and a slow-burn constructed around barre exercises in the first half didn’t serve her talent to best effect.

Two Feet, Adelaide FestivalCredit:RVANSTARREX

The Art Gallery of South Australia provided a stirring retrospective of the works of Australian painter Ben Quilty, which united visual odes to bogan spirit (paintings of his beloved Torana) with socially engaged work that evoked darkness and suffering lurking under Australian surfaces.

Among the highlights of Quilty's works were portraits of soldiers serving in Afghanistan, Rorschach landscapes from northern NSW shadowed by colonial massacres of Aborigines, and his piercing portrait of executed Bali Nine drug-trafficker-turned-artist Myuran Sukumaran, a tropical island beast rising, jaws-wide, from the sea behind him.

Paul Kelly, James Ledger, Alice Keath and the Seraphim Trio pulled off a coup with Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds, a musical response to verse about birds from poets including Emily Dickinson, A.D. Hope, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Judith Wright. Part art music, part poetry reading and part folk-rock oratorio, it was by turns profoundly moving, playful and darkly atmospheric – and something the rest of Australia will hotly anticipate.

New Australian circus from Gravity and Other Myths delivered deconstructed acrobatics of breath-taking novelty. Whether Out of Chaos… really explored the nexus between order and chaos was debatable, but there was no question the show had a distinctive, fresh and entertaining approach to the form.

The one show guaranteed to cause a lather left audiences with a ghoulish souvenir: soap made from human fat

Experimental art offered the most memorable adventures and the one show guaranteed to cause a lather left audiences with a ghoulish souvenir: soap made from human fat. Performance installation Schuldfabrik, created by Dutch artist Julian Hetzel, took over a shopfront in the CBD where shoppers could buy bars of "Self" soap – a high-quality product manufactured using tummy fat donated by liposuction patients.

Festivalgoers sample human soap on offer at Julian Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik.Credit:Russell Millard

If that sounds a bit like a scene from Fight Club, Hetzel’s revolutionary ambit would have made Tyler Durden proud. The idea is to generate a guerrilla economy – one that monetises the guilt of the first world and injects it into a virtuous cycle, where our excess is upcycled for the benefit of developing countries.

Un Poyo Rojo.Credit:Ishka Michocka

The installation draws audiences into the bowels of the soap factory, where we encounter plastic surgeon Dr Hennie Spronk, who demonstrates the liposuction procedure and philosophises on art, science and changing ideals of beauty. It invites us to consider the true weight of guilt and responsibility while spruiking a non-profit business model: for each bar of soap sold, the proceeds, plus an additional bar of soap, will be donated to villages in the Congo.

As for the product, it’s surprisingly lovely – almost a soap and a moisturiser rolled into one, leaving your hands soft and smelling like, well, human skin.

But perhaps my favourite piece was Un Poyo Rojo, which took contemporary dance as close to physical comedy as it can go. An hilarious, tender and mercurial pas de deux between two men in a locker room, it explored Latin masculinity, locking machismo and homoeroticism into a dynamic tussle through a daring, sometimes shockingly intimate movement vocabulary charged with possibility.

No large arts festival is without disappointment. The tragicomic clowning in Palmyra – presumably reflecting the destructive nature of humanity as seen in the demolition of Syrian ancient monuments – lacked energy and finesse, and by ignoring the goodwill of spectators during a spot of audience participation, was upstaged by it.

There were other less-than-stellar offerings though the general strength of the program made less surprising the announcement on Monday that Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy will remain co-artistic directors of Adelaide Festival until at least 2023, making them the longest serving in the role in the festival's history.

Gravity and Other Myths perform Out of Chaos… at Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania, March 9-11. Paul Kelly, James Ledger, Alice Keath and Seraphim Trio perform Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds at the City Recital Hall, Sydney, June 1 and Melbourne Recital Centre, June 14.

Cameron Woodhead travelled to Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide Festival.

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