Phillip Adams BalletLab at Temperance Hall is the Australian amplifier of experimental dance, performance and art. Temperance Hall champions queer artistic ambition, creating transformative dance and cultural experiences that are open to all.

The most recent performance was held during Midsumma. SICK provides complicated critiques pervading notions and expectations of artists with disability, in an attempt to reframe the debate. Beyond a definition of physical and mental illness, ‘sick’ contains both negative and positive associations. For Ryan, a person with autism, ‘sick’ implies an impulse to act out of the ordinary with his body and thoughts; to arrange things the way he feels and sees them. Phillip and Ryan turn the negative on its head, taking inspiration in the slang connotations of the word ‘sick’ as ‘cool’ or ‘fabulous’.

"...SICK is remarkable because the performers are so focused and project such untroubled seriousness; in spite of its eccentricities it has the compelling solemnity of an occult ritual"
- Andrew Fuhrmann, The Age

"Ryan New and Phillip Adams invite us into a world of struggle and triumph where memory, internal monologue and shifting awareness combine, layer and, at times, shatter into shards on the scarlet carpet, defying outside logic but evoking the common struggle to define oneself in a world of imposed limitations"
- Daniel Townsend, Australian Arts Review