Phillip Adams is the Founder and Artistic Director of Philip Adams Balletlab. Phillip Adams' career in dance and performance spans over 25 years as a vital contributor to the richness of Australian performing arts. Miracle takes up contemporary concerns about religious radicalism and uses revolutionary evangelist groups from the 1960s and 70s to explore the dynamics of group behaviour, rapture and the desire to achieve an alternate, transcendent state of being through religion. Our brief was to capture the essence of the narrative and establish a compelling, image driven campaign that reflected a vision that was at once brutal and sublime.
Artistic Director, Phillip Adams considered the manipulative power of Jim Jones of The People's Temple and Australia's own celebrated alternative cult/community, the Universal Brotherhood to create Miracle, in which the group experience of emotionally charged religious fervour and alienation from conventional life is played out as an experiential performance.
What transpires is an examination of the promises of a new beginning and the false hopes and religious stereotypes that these practices produce. The work builds up to a choreographic crescendo, including dissonant playing of harmonicas, and an epiphany that culminates in a phenomena – of live levitation by two dancers – The Miracle.
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