Garry Stewart, ADT and the Superstars of Dance

These two Articles have just popped up in the Adelaide Advertiser (represent!) and News.com.au , and it's great to see that Garry Stewart and ADT crew are doing so well. Pure Funk have worked with the ADT in past and been amazingly impressed by the job Garry does with his talented stable of dancers. Can't wait to check it out!

THEY have only just returned from a starring Hollywood role, but there's no slowing down for Garry Stewart and the Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre.

The company has just taken part in Superstar Dancers Of The World, a primetime dance series for NBC which airs next week in the US.

But they'll be back in rehearsals in the Adelaide ADT studios tomorrow for the opening night of the Sydney Festival, for which the city's CBD will be tranformed into an epic outdoor celebration of music and dance.

ADT will perform in Martin Place alongside Bangarra and Sydney Dance Company as part of the "movers and shakers" – showcasing the best of the best of Australian dance.

Another major highlight of the festival will be delivered by ADT creative director Garry. As one of Australia's leading choreographers, festival director Nigel Jamieson asked Garry to create a specially choreographed dance performance for the opening event, Festival First Night.

Just after sunset on January 10, all 10 open-air stages across the CBD will stop and an anticipated 250,000 people will perform Garry's dance, The Sydney, simultaneously, transforming the CBD into possibly the world's largest dance floor.

The dance will apparently be set to a collection of dance music from the Balkans.

FROM choreographing a performance to move a large audience to getting a large audience to move . . . Garry Stewart is Australia's lord of the dance.

Australian Dance Theatre's artistic director and the man behind Sydney Festival's communal dance, The Sydney, Stewart has just returned from showcasing some of the country's best dancers in a US reality TV show which will be beamed to millions.

Called Superstars Of Dance, the show has been dubbed by some as "the Dance Olympics". It pits dancers from eight countries: Ireland, India, the US, Argentina, China, Russia, South Africa and Australia against each other.

While he is sworn to secrecy on the results of the show until it airs, Stewart praised the Australian dancers, who "did an exceptional job and matched the quality of everything else there".

For Stewart it's a case of going from one extreme to the other, as he will now watch The Sydney, executed by about 250,000 Sydneysiders, as part of Festival First Night on January 10.