Kimball Wong has danced with Australian Dance Theatre for a little over 10 years. He said The Beginning of Nature, which had its Australian premiere at the Canberra Theatre on Thursday night, was "a study into the rhythms of nature".
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He said the movements combined the animalistic with sections that evoked the tides, the lunar and solar patterns, and other aspects of the natural world.
"There is obviously a very human element to all of this – we are part of nature," he said.
But, he said, a lot of the time the movement was working to dehumanise the dancers to create a sense of otherworldliness.
Choreographed by the Adelaide company's artistic director, Garry Stewart, the work combines movement with a score by Brendan Woithe. The music will be performed live in Canberra by the Zephyr String Quartet and sung by two Indigenous classical singers in the Kaurna language, the Indigenous language of the Adelaide plains.
Woithe has collaborated with Stewart for the past eight years and has written all the music for him but Stewart said this was the first time he had worked with a quartet and two singers on stage.
"I wanted to have singing in the work but not in English because that's only been spoken on this continent for about 230 years," he said.
The Kaurna language was almost lost because its Indigenous speakers were wiped out by colonisation but was revived a few decades ago through a journal kept by two missionaries in the late 19th century.
"They transcribed about 2000 words phonetically."
This became the basis for the revival and Stewart has worked with Jack Buckskin, who has learned the language fluently.
"His children will be the first generation to have learned it from infancy in a century."
Stewart said Wong was "one of the best dancers this country's ever seen" and would be taking part in a short film that was a separate component of The Beginning of Nature project, along with avirtual reality experienced based on the dance piece.
"This is the first piece in the nature series," he said, which he envisaged as a suite of works about the relationship between science and nature, subjects that had always interested him, and which he said seemed more timely than ever given current events and the challenges humanity was facing.
"This work is not utopian but it is not dystopian either - it's a reminder we are intrinsic, a component of the material of nature itself," he said.
The Beginning of Nature is on at the Canberra Theatre until June 15 at 7.30pm. canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 62752700.
