Words: Chloe Metcalfe
What do elite sport and dance have in common? It’s a simple question that led Gabrielle Nankivell to create her latest body of work.
The dancer and cycling enthusiast says she’s always felt there are many parts of the cycling world that are applicable to dancing and working within groups of physical people - a commonality that has become more apparent to her over time.
“The pressures of ageing, the pressures of time and what’s happening on a physiological, emotional and mental level, it’s kind of like just as you’re coming into your intellectual peak you’ve just tipped over the edge and physiological decline is starting to happen,” she says.
Wonder Grit is the amalgamation of this thought process, presenting an energetic dance and theatre work that explores what it is to strive, to lose and win, to have your body fail you and to be at the mercy of uncontrollable elements.
“It explores lots of things to do with time, the affects of time on the body, on the potential of what you can do in a career and this idea of a loss of potential that comes in different layers,” Gabrielle says.
While this work largely came from Gabrielle’s own experiences, it also draws from her collaborator Jo Stone and a selection of crowd sourced data which researched how other people perceive winning, losing and uncontrollable elements, and how they connect them to movement.
“The first draft of the script we took all the information out of the surveys and collated each question as a bunch of responses and that’s what we initially used to write the script. There was also movement instructions and things people would like to see on stage, so we’ve incorporated those as well,” she says.
“For example, some of the text in the second scene there’s ‘heart exploding, arms wide, eyes taking in the adoring crowd, sparkling, empowering, exhilarating confetti and applause’ that’s direct from someone’s survey response. We also don’t know who wrote the surveys, they’re anonymous, so it’s interesting for us as we kind of smooshed them together. Whether or not that’s recognisable for people will be interesting.”
With opening night at the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Space Theatre just around the corner, Jo Stone says audiences can expect a performance that has a lot of heart and speaks to the ebbs and flows of life.
“There’s a real journey and rollercoaster of hopes, attempt and losses throughout it and I think you can apply that analogy to life in general,” she says.
“Hopefully it will resonate with people with some of the losses, gains and joys that they’ve experienced in life.
“Ultimately, it’s a story about people.”
Wonder Grit is showing as part of The Move; a curated initiative by Dance Hub SA, The Mill and Ausdance SA, presented by Adelaide Festival Centre.