Fringe Review: New Romantics
A collection of contemporary dance performances enlivened by a wholehearted commitment to immersion. ★★★
If you’re wondering what Adelaide’s up-and-coming dancers are up to this Fringe, New Romantics is a pretty good place to start. Across four short contemporary performances, a collective of emerging artists present original choreography backed by immersive sound design and powerful storytelling.
The opening act A Moment Of (Redacted) invites audiences to consider the crossover between love and weakness: is our capacity to love tied to our willingness to be vulnerable? This uses synth music and treadmills to symbolise life as a conveyor belt in a relentless propulsion, with the performers physically displaying the universal struggle to hold life’s pace and persevere when you falter and fall.
From there, solo performance The Great Thinning shifts inward, stripping everything back to explore what it means to shed our layers, testing our emotional endurance. This features repetitive movement, gaining intensity through each cycle of physical movements until the crescendo is met to ask how many layers we can shed before we are no longer whole.
After intermission, Interlocked dives into life’s entanglements, literally brought to life as ropes stretch, twist, and weave across the stage, binding the performing trio, embodying the complexity of human relationships.
The finale, Starry Eyed, kicks off with a performer being carried onstage in essentially a body bag; if that doesn’t grab your attention, what will? This final segment doesn’t quite reach the climax audiences may have expected, given the build-up generated from the earlier pieces, thanks to less physically intense choreography which lets original vocal performance take the lead.
You may or may not love this collection, but it definitely deserves to be seen and supported. The dancers are bold, emotional and unapologetically themselves. You’ll walk out trying to piece it all together, a sure sign that you’ve experienced something meaningful and deeply felt.
New Romantics is playing at Main Theatre at Goodwood Theatre and Studios February 19 – February 22
