Thunderstruck: A Night of Classic Rock
★★★½
Contemporary dance performed live in a darkened theatre to a soundtrack of rock classics by AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd, performed live by a classically trained violinist: surely, it doesn’t get more fringe?
One of the reasons a global network of Fringe Festivals exists is to support work that sits on the fringes of the mainstream: work that defies neat art form classifications, work that’s simply too weird, too strange, too avant-garde, too fringe to be programmed in mainstream or mainstage arts festivals and venues. Thunderstruck: A Night of Classic Rock is such a show.
Produced by Blue Violin (aka Chris Vuk, the founder and first violinist of the Boston String Quartet) and Lewis Major Projects (founded in 2015 by Lewis Major, an award-winning choreographer, director and creative entrepreneur with a background in sheep shearing and a foreground in contemporary dance theatre), Thunderstruck pairs contemporary dance with virtuosic violin covers of truly classic hard rock tracks – including one sequence performed to a piece from the classical music canon.
The dance is exquisite, with the performers wearing long black socks to evoke the ‘Dirty Boots’ of rock ’n’ roll, though this does mean it’s hard to see the placement of the dancers’ feet on the fog-shrouded stage lit by a circle of electronic candles at the start of the show and elsewhere throughout the production. Thunderstruck is also visually stunning, with an open invitation offered for audience members to film and photograph (no flash, please!) the proceedings.
The personal touches – such as Vuk describing coming from minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit and snow in Colorado Springs, Colorado to 40 degrees Celsius in Adelaide – are strong and the dance displays a beautiful precision, expression and cleanness of line. Conversely, Vuk occasionally leans a little too heavily into the rock star persona at times, typified by one sequence in which the dancers surround him with candles, like a god in a shrine, resulting in the movement vocabulary feeling extraneous or overlooked in such moments. Consequently, greater directorial balance is required to make Thunderstruck: A Night of Classic Rock truly sing and fully become the sum of its parts – but oh, what beautiful parts they are.
Thunderstruck: A Night of Classic Rock
Presented by Blue Violin and Lewis Major Choreography
Key creatives: Chris Vuk: Violin
Lewis Major: Choreography
Cast: Chris Vuk aka Blue Violin
Dancers: Abbey Harby, Elsi Faulks, Siobhan Lynch and Stefaan Morrow
Adelaide College of the Arts Main Theatre and additional regional venues
Tickets: $25 to $48 plus $4.80 transaction fee
Until 14 March 2025
Additional regional venues from 19 March – 1 April 2025