I live in Melbourne Australia. For the past 20 years I have been artist director of BalletLab and from 2016 founding director of dance performance and art space Temperance Hall.

 In my many years as a dancer / wanderer, I have trespassed over a floor-boarded and Tarkett-ed history of my benevolent forbearers. I cross/passed the ancestral terrains between Australia and New York on a scaffolding of 80s and 90s dance lineages, in as gracious a manor as I could, courtesy of release techniques. 10 years on, in 1998, I dug back into the dance soils of my Australian ancestry’s godforsaken blood lines, that were enriching the land here in Melbourne. I was a nomadic settler of notoriety “setting up camp”; flaunting my wares with an ornateness that was to my peculiar liking. Such was my decadent show and tell, there came a sight altercation with soiling here. With my inquisitive ways upon the norm, I was haphazardly consigning a third wave dance colonisation in Australia. I was sprinkling the choreo’ mindset of the New York downtown, contemporary, agitative dance scene around Melbourne. As it turned out my fertilising of the soils in such the way that I did, was mining a terra firma for queering in Australian dance., albeit rooted in a doggerel stance of Western theatre dance.

Post the ‘drive in’ of yesteryear, newsreels, Abbott and Costello shorts, cartoons, westerns, musicals and horror sci-fi double features, I still live in a Looney Tunes world. When television first made its appearance in my life, what came with it was the gift of a remote button. This was a technological teleportation medium that flicked me though a new world viewfinder; a living room screen of fictional narratives, feeding me a steady diet of American and British sitcoms, variety shows and telemovies. The recordings of these reels and screens were the storyboard of my early dancing for the family ‘Super Eight’ camera home movies and tapping as Jerry (mouse) with Gene Kelly. Then, many years later (in 1985) I was officially on TV in Sydney. I was a Channel 9 backup dancer on the daytime Mike Wash Show.  I had finally made it, studio dancing live “on air”.  A few years earlier, with all the markings of a TV dancer to be, I am quantifying up as a Donny Osmond type in mauve pant suited 70s review mode, stepping out the lyrics “down the way where the nights are gay” on the Canberra Theatre stage.

Everything goes to plan even when it’s not. Know what I mean?  My career arrived and departed with a New York 80’s and 90’s choreographic state of mind. I go as far as to say that my elations to use queering as a choreographic labour in my practise, raised from a happenstance of influences. This was, most relevantly, informed by the New York mindset of performance dance and art scenes that I orbited around in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. An idea of ‘borrowing down’ from the Western cannon of post-modern dance of that time provides some clues to my works’ specified terms of “queering”. 

Choreographers occupying New York’s contemporary dance ghetto in the late 80s and 90s were holding dear in the grip of their studios a hangover of their ancestor’s post-modern dance bloodlines. The historical ‘truths’ of the 1960s Judson Church Theatre and Grand Union foundry choreographers; Forti, Paxton, Brown and Rainer etc ruled over social, political and artistic fields. These were running deep in the releasing bones of latter day 90s choreographer saints, and were charged with experimentation and radicalism. 

Arriving in New York in 1989, I was ushered into the working environments of choreographers John Jasperse, Donna Uchizono Tere O'connor and BeBe Miller. Their languages drawing on multiple perspectives, yielding new insights into the dance field and it’s relationship to a larger cultural picture that was happening in Downtown performances at Ps 122, The Kitchen,  Dancesapce Project  St Marks Church and the SoHo loft scene.  The 90s contemporary dance languages pouted around with dead pan sincerity, ganging up on post-modern dance linage which is old enough now to have a tradition, yet still remain unnamed and uncodified. Influences between choreographers were becoming less direct and more fragmented. As a spectator, I  drifted into the official 90’s dance mafia’s post-balletic deconstructed style, held court by Stephen Petronio, Amanda Miller (Pretty Ugly) and on the occasion Michael Clark in the company of Karole Armitage and Charles Atlas.  On the flip side my participation with the political mavericks Dance Noise, Ishmael Houston Jones, Jennifer Monson and David Zambrano (improvisational back guy, white guy and queer guy contact jamming). In this post-modern world, queerness was easily accepted. Queerness was information that passed around these international communities. A specific community that travelled in high-end places within the dance culture, exchanging information. I began to move through that subculture as a regular guest. I trace points of artistic discourse arising within my work from the late 90s as leading to a proposal of Queer influence in Australian contemporary dance.

Choreographic proposals of this time were still largely of a Western middle class, post-modern mentality, adamant at generating dance languages of dissent and anti-authoritarianism, against an establishment or disaffiliation from institution.

 It is difficult to acclimate Queer within Australian contemporary dance, and that is because of its very limiting presence in the field. However, in it’s scope as an irregularity, queer has retained it’s relevance as an intrinsically critical distributor of aesthetics and negotiator of “obscuring” in dance histories. What I have ascertained about queering in my practise is that it has evoked movement as an exotic choreographic language albeit in a subversive manner of comprehension. A study of Queer representation in Australian contemporary dance pre the late 90s reveals very little activity. Queer performance, and to some degree dance, during the 70s and 80s were predominantly a circumspect of homosexual subcultural scenes. There was very little outlet in the mainstream for Queer cultural representation and artists were struggling to find a more general audience and so forced response in their work was more directed towards the AIDS crises. In Australian theatre, visual arts and photography, revered prominent Queer artists brokering homosexual and Queer representationalism in the public domain included; David McDiarmid, Maria Kozic Juan Davila and William Yang.  The norm of narrative in their work was also largely a reactionary protest to, discriminating laws against homosexuality and a Queer subtext of reposed hetro-masculinity.  In dance, there remained an old-fashioned queerness hiding in plain sight within ballet (and modern dance by extension). That’s the reason why dance in Australia was slow to incorporate Queerness/ gayness. 

Exploring queer as a subjectivity must also be accountable for my work’s eclectic multivalent attempt at exploring gay male identity at that time of the 90s, as well as the choreography becoming a sexual creative subjectivity. At this point in my career, my work scoped out into writings (graphy) of Queer in Australian dance as it had assumed a position well enough to highjack the dancer’s relationship to choreography, while strategically undermining the normative process and in its capacities to share new space for choreo-visual relationships in dance as an interdisciplinary approach.

 t felt like I was being true to myself; as a homosexual I was brought up in an ideal world that rejected me and I found myself attracted to the theatrical, pageantry and the ritual as a frontier of escapism. However, I had to accept that it was a world in which I did not belong and that homosexuality would always leave me on the outside. I fared well because I continued rotating in a turnstile of queer mindedness without fear. More specifically, as a young artist emerging at a time of social crisis which was the AIDS epidemic in New York (from the mid 80s to the late 90s). I learnt that the most important action for me was the expression of acceptance. 

When I graduated from the Victorian College of The Arts in 1988, no one gave me advice on how best to direct my awkward jumping around the studio. ‘Devil may care’ got me everywhere, but I wonder what I would have done if I didn’t follow my passion of dance, maybe I would have become a baker or a filmmaker… interesting that I do both of those things now.

What a wacky time to be entering the dance field. Dance as an assessable environment of travel; residencies and touring have narrowed dramatically through the isolations that we have all endured . . . weathered the storm. As each new generation hosts a response-ivity, action(ing) a universality of what dance can be, it has never been more in close proximity to our immediate communities, this is where the deepest connections are to be made. Inspiration is right in front of us, it’s in the communities of your fellow neighbours we danced at college with and the movers and collaborations off and online (as much as the online thing can be a pain in the arse right?)  Those virtual conversations are some foundry assets of what may become a future exchange when we all get back in touch with mother nature, not the way it was, but in a more sympatric frolicking court dance with her.

Dance, of all the art forms, has historically been one of the most accessible, adaptable and culturally translatable of artistic expressions. I loved the immediate sharing of dance in variants of global communities online throughout the pandemic. This brought a joyous, political, radical, romantic and physical outpouring of connections. This connection is in the keyboard typing I am doing right now, and that may hopefully provide some commutation of information sharing between us all.

I thought to end my contribution to the Understory initiative with some lucid writing, that perhaps could be a truer account of what it feels like to be graduating together during these times.

Much of what I do alludes to grim subjects filtered through a gesture of lustful beauty, the story of decline, the descent into hell; a-vision, accidents, and fatalities. One might say that my preoccupation with falling reflects a sense that we live in dusky times. I have been falling through history with choreography, alongside my fellow acrobats (shooting out of cannons), sky divers, and dancers embracing falling as part of their every rehearsal. I never cease falling in love with the figures around me. They appear the same, in falls of terror or joy, whether they are plummeting to their deaths like Spitfire war planes; darting through passages of synchronised space, holding and testing patterns or falling from grace. Epic soundtracks modulate shattering sound barriers and they break their fall onto soft landing pads. I am fixated in the tension created by that uncertainty and how it affects the viewer’s response.

I fall through history with a choreography of telefilms that altered and appropriated figures from the history of Western art, from Baroque and science fiction to the present. The Holy Grail is the camera of my body, capturing the figures from their historical moment and connecting them in a continuous stream that transcends period, style, and subject matter to reveal the psychology of falling as a universal aspect of human consciousness.  Falling is a prophetic motion of dark and light subjects. I searched the dark sky with 20th Century Fox’s beaming studio lamps (Miracle 2009) and Glory (2019) and EVER (2017) for something greater than we could anticipate. Playing out on a huge scale, Miracle figures “the sorcerer light” a streaming babel of lucid Greek Gods in an opening scene of an epic biblical remake. Now it seems there is something biblical about this reckoning with the modern-day Saint’s filling their lungs in a chorale of perpetual terror. The figures appear to be suspended, representing a state of grace (however momentary). In my lucid research on the history of falling I found, surprisingly, that the survivors of long falls rarely experienced fear while descending. Falling isn't the problem; it's the landing. Dancing out of the sky, without a narrative is an invitation of spatiotemporal lucid dreaming.

Airing my body out in loops, I genuflect when I move. A meter of satisfaction. A faithful tracing in thyself. A fortune of reverences. Hosting the untamed and naming ‘me’ in rites of wrong. Preparation in empty spaces. A vale of pondering the vast that temps an attempted delete. Major. Collecting officially an all-in favour lining of descents in venerations of looping. As perfect as a mountain goat’s cliff climbing skills, the fright is vanished in flight. Singled momentarily scattered. Unceasing my body, for the time being, I arrive from miles away everywhere. Wiper cleansing takes away the culpable me - an appearance proposer - the lonely abound. A pasture queerer than the other side, collapses mighty and magnificent, conflicted in hope, the looping galvanises my fall from pace. Waiting time is fated in weighted indecisions and visitations, can I watch you do it one more time piece.

Imaginable eternal, a cadence roped in white tights, a thrilling stillness collapsing straightforward into 80s new wave. I collapsed in an undulating synchronic memorial of bankrupt bodies full of gauged purity.

I get clear in queer, sin - queerly yours.

Phillip Adams