LESS

LESS was a site-specific performance created and performed by the Australian Dance Party and collaborating dance artists and musicians, within the architectural LESS Pavilion at Dairy Road, Fyshwick, across 12 performances in March 2022 as part of the Enlighten Festival and the Bold Festival.

LESS was directed by Alison Plevey in collaboration with dancers Ryan Stone, Ashlee Bye, Levente Szabo, Jake Silvestro, Patricia Hayes-Cavanagh and Gabriel Sinclair. Sound design by Alex Voorhoeve with live instrumentation by Liam Budge (vocals) and John Mackey (sax). Lighting design by Ove Mcleod. Costume design by Aislinn King.

Aislinn King, APDG Jennie Tate Costume Design for Live Performance SELECTED FINALIST 2023
LESS received a Canberra Critics’ Circle AWARD Dance 2022

Photography by: Gupi De Zavalia, Olivia Fyfe, Peter King, Ann Cleary, Aislinn King

In response to the architects’ intention for the pavilion to ‘return to nature’ through weathering and deterioration of the concrete over time, I created a series of photographic imprints capturing markings and abstract lines that relate to the linearity and seams within the pavilion form.

With the dancers’ movements in the plane of water the layers of grey costume started to reveal water markings in the same way that the concrete columns become temporarily stained in water.

Within the immense scale of the concrete columns, the performers’ scale and ephemerality is emphasised in contrasting white costume elements. The sense of ruin and of ancient, monolithic places that the LESS Pavilion evokes, inspired a reductive approach to the costume elements with hints of remnant silhouettes and rituals.

Through an embodied design approach, the costumes emerged as a medium to translate and connect the contextual and interpretive qualities of the performance.

LESS situated the audience amidst dancers and musicians interacting with an architectural pavilion in many different conditions of light, air, rain and water. The audience was immersed from the onset, sitting on a shallow plane of water and many intuitively found connection to the site and performance through removing their shoes.