Ei Fallen 2000
Choreographer Phillip Adams used the action of falling and Humpty Dumpty as a departure point for his highly charged work Ei Fallen. Ei Fallen was performed by Luke Smiles, Luke George and Michelle Heaven. The work was presented as part of a triple bill Combination #3 which drew together three exciting contemporary choreographers, Japan’s extraordinary choreographer Kim Itoh and Chunky Move’s then Artistic Director and choreographer Gideon Obarzanek.
Creative Team
Choreography Phillip Adams
Set & Lighting Design Gideon Obarzanek, Dorotka Sapinska
Costume & Set Design Dorotka Sapinska
Original Performers Luke Smiles, Luke George, Michelle Heaven
Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek
Executive Producer Jennifer Barry
World Premiere
20 October 2000 Melbourne
Partners
Melbourne International Arts Festival
Note from the Choreographer
Phillip Adams
Ei Fallen (2000) translates the English nursery rhyme Humpy Dumpty as a choreography to animative forms. The choreography satirizes the rhyme’s narrative of Kings Horseman’s attempt to rescue a bow tied foppish English egg after falling off a brick wall, meet with a tragic end. On opening three performers are discovered sitting on the boundary wall of a fluorescent chicken coop environment wearing bodice egg suits. What follows is a scramble for survival and of the fittest in the face of aversity to balance. The choreography experiments with highly technical duet and trio rebounding’s off and on the wall executed with precision and speed. The frantic clambering of the eggs is meet with a crippling fall off the wall to uncertain ends. In the second half of the 18min work an egg rescue operation takes place by the ungainly courtly entrance of armless Kings Horseman’s. The horseman enters with balletic gallivanting’s of spring points, soutenu and Assemblé performed to a royal fanfare of trumpeting. The Horseman’s rescue attempts to rebuild the forlorn cracked egg back together again, is mimicked with ridiculousness and fantastic failures.
Ei Fallen, is at war with the court dance, and its weapons are the ballet steps of my early training in the Royal Dance Academy technique (RAD) and the legions of cartoons, and pantomimes of my childhood. The work is a reinvestigation of my musical youth to supremacy, competition, ritual, conformity and subversion that become the discursive basis that linkages between seemingly isolated narrative ideas of quixotic Mannering’s, providing a unique point of entry into my eclectic concerns and investigation of queering aesthetics. It seems the dances of my childhood have been necessary ingredients of an adult queering cohesion. Further the liturgical crucibles, in combination with my Western dance education, return the meaning of queering to its association with something that is “unexpected " or "peculiar".
Taking a look back at this early work has revealed a much about my delight in disappointment and for failure. What I draw from this work is that embodies the precursory of my adolescent relationship with dance as both historical and hysterical. As Judith Halberstam quotes in her essay The Queer Art of Failure [Low Theory 23] ….on failure I hold onto what have been characterized as childish and immature notions of possibility and look for alternatives in the form of what Foucault calls” subjugated knowledge across the culture: in subcultures, countercultures and even popular culture . I note in Ei Fallen a transgressive release of utter silliness is their resignation to failure. The charters fail in the sublime tragedy of the “fallen”, [victims] in reverting to childishness as an anti-disciplining of historic forms and in anthropomorphising the “talented” hero. Their failing present an opportunity rather than a death. Ei Fallen opens up new narrative opportunities to encounter between the childish the transformative and the queer. [186]
"Seriously weird and deliberately unbeautiful" The Age
"Idiosyncratic mix of sleaze, humour sex and death" Sydney Morning Herald
