Katie Rudd in 'Lost + Found'. Tempo Dance Festival, 2017. Photo Carol Brown Design Kasia Pol

Lost + Found [dances of exile]. Tempo Dance Festival

6 October 2017. Q Theatre complex, Auckland. Choreography: Carol Brown

This layered work of a ‘reactivated archival material from former Bodenwieser dancers including Shona Dunlop MacTavish, Hilary Napier and Hilde Holger’ is presented as an itinerant event with audience members following dancers and narrator as they move through the out-back, off-stage spaces of the Q Theatre complex. Spoken introductions are interspersed with fragments of dance by couples and triples in stairwells, corridors and half-way spaces that suggest history is at best caught piecemeal and personally.

Film and sound excerpts are included en route but you receive all these as random mosaic rather than linear sequence. The audience finally assembles in the foyer for the projection onto a split screen of fragments from Bodenwieser dancers, paralleled with new sequences by the present performers, who are members of the New Zealand Dance Company. I personally would have appreciated more sequential use of that historical footage, with identification of who and what we were watching. Bodenwieser unleashed and encouraged such expressionist commitment from her dancers, a quality that today’s performers would do well to be reminded of.

I would have dearly loved to see a performance of a complete short work, say Bodenwieser’s Demon Machine, from 1924, interpolated into Lost + Found. (It’s not impossible. This after all was a highly acclaimed, prize-winning work in the same choreographic competition in Paris that saw Kurt Jooss win first prize for his Der Grüne Tisch/The Green Table. Dunlop is alive and spirited still today, and was in fact present at this season. Brown was herself in an early New Zealand staging of the work in 1970s, as were students at New Zealand School of Dance in 1980s, and reconstruction can be aided by the fact that the choreography also exists in Laban notation score). ‘The machine gains ascendancy over the souls of the people instead of man dominating the machine. The vital problem of our age’ … reads the original 1924 program note. More than 90 years later, there is resonance in our age of digital burn-out that represents so much contemporary communication.

The arresting image on the program cover, of Shona Dunlop in her own solo, Two souls alas, reside within my breast (as I recall, this was the first choreography not by Bodenwieser in that company repertoire), is collaged with the ecstatic backward lean of Dunlop as Cain in Cain and Abel, but both these images remain unidentified and uncaptioned.

Many of those attending will have found the mystery and unpredicability of this work an engaging and refreshing experience. I personally find some degree of distraction in the encounters with other audience members that are inevitable as we move from space to space, and from the curious tone of narration that accompanied the work. That said, I did catch some fragments of exquisite intertwined arm movements by two women in the stairwell, and wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Perhaps history is made up only of such fragments and memories?

Jennifer Shennan, 15 October 2017

Featured image: Katie Rudd in Lost + Found. Tempo Dance Festival, 2017. Photo: Carol Brown. Design: Kasia Pol

Sir Jon Trimmer and William Fitzgerald in 'Lark' from 'whY Cromozone'. Tempo Dance Festival, 2017. Photo: © Amanda Billing

whY Chromozone. Tempo Dance Festival

7 October 2017, Q Theatre, Auckland.

Reviewed by Jennifer Shennan

Tempo Dance Festival has always had a program slot, Y Chromozone, for an exclusively male line-up of choreographers and dancers to do their thing.

I remember it in previous years being overlong, over compered, and in need of more insightful programme notes—but as one who thinks gender has little to do with choreographic vision anyway, I was always going to be hard to convince of the concept. (I know, I know, I’m in a minority here, but I am a member of many minority groups and that is no bother to me, per se). OK, let’s to the dance…

The first listed item did not happen, but there was no announcement to warn us of that. That’s a serious issue for a reviewer working in the dark through a program of 13 separate items without interval. I don’t usually take notes during a performance but prefer to remember what is memorable, consulting the program before and after. For that to work, you don’t want the second item playing as the first.

That said, the opener was stunning—Not, choreographed and performed by Oliver Carruthers, to music Tourists by Nicolas Jaar. He was carried onstage in a twisted knot which then unfolded, limb by twist, to open finally into the straight line of his body. A secure mover this one, from Unitec.

Asmodeus, choreographed and performed by Jay Clement (to Arsonist’s Lullaby by Hosier), a gymnast harnessing extraordinary strength and balance. He spent most of the dance upside down, on the palm of one hand, legs airborne, slowly rotating on top of three poles, in a delicious slow-motion dance that held tight to its music, thus allowing poetry to emerge from its power.

Enough, choreographed by val smith, was performed by two great wild things swathed in 1000 shaggy sheepskins. They edged on walking sticks hesitantly and painfully from downstage left to upstage right. About mid-stage they rolled over each other, and one great monster pulled apart to become two—so I guess you could say they sprogged. They then continued the pilgrimage across the stage. These were creatures that Maurice Sendak might have designed. Music is identified as ‘anonymous vaporwave track pirated from a gay porn site’. Well, they said it. The whole strange hilarious thing was possibly a metaphor, depending on what you want from your metaphors.

Me, Myself But Why? choreographed by Stephen Hidalgo, performed by Stephen Hidalgo and Stephen Hidalgo. This screen-to-stage conversation between ‘himselves’ as screen figure and on-stage dancer was played with brilliant timing and a sharp dry wit that had us in stitches. Lucky this isn’t a competition as we’ve had four winners already and we’re not even a third of the way through the program.

This is a thing, choreographed and performed by Connor Masseurs, to Freefallin Dreams by Saje, was a contemplative solo at times reminiscent of a breakdancing insect, at other times a beguiling man. No program note to profile the dancer, just an obtuse paragraph that did no justice to the interesting textures of the very well-shaped dance we saw.

Dane Head, a 14 year old pupil of Allan Barry at Mt. Eden Ballet Academy, performed the peasant pas male variation from Giselle. His impressively clean technique and sound musicality, coupled with his obvious delight in dancing, made for a pleasant experience for him and us, both.

Outcast by Fenjay Sapon was a quartet of Unitec dancers often pitching one against three. Confident in their strength and their ability to build atmosphere, their use of rhythms and canon added interesting depth to this piece.

Liberate-He, by Earl de Castro was a thrust of waacking and voguing, tight jeans and high heels, all pitch perfect.

Joe Carvalho performed a mesmerising solo on an acrobatic circus apparatus, the cyr wheel. Harnessed through music, A Little Walk to Nowhere by Brain Damage, this performance brought Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, after waiting 530 years in a manuscript, to spend time with us. This was a miracle of true proportion and conversation with gravity. Carvalho’s heroic performance was delivered with a modesty that will not easily be forgotten

Lark, choreographed by Loughlan Prior, of Royal New Zealand Ballet, performed by Jon Trimmer and William Fitzgerald, proved a masterwork. There’s little surprise in that since Prior has already earned considerable choreographic kudos. 78 year-old Trimmer’s presence on stage, before he even moves a muscles, reeks with the authenticity of a performer who deeply knows how dance works. Fitzgerald moves with a calm clarity that makes virtuosity seem effortless, and his elevation is something to savour. Suffice to say this piece portraying an older dancer as he sifts memories of dances past, alongside a younger dancer’s questing after the kinds of things that will bring meaning to his future performances, had a poignancy to treasure.

Blue Bird, by Christopher Olwage, has recently been performed as part of Viennese Pride celebrations in Austria and we can be sure it received the same audience appreciation there as here. To Young and Beautiful by Lana Del Ray, the dancer en pointe and with costume of blue feathers that were shed in stages, suggested a cabaret twilight of happiness tinged with yearning.

The final slot, Idco Next Generation—Swagganauts, is a team of nine young Hip Hop dancers who have all the cut and thrust of seasoned street dance. Precision, speed, agility, cool, and a cap with the peak going down the back are all stitched in place so’s you couldn’t slip a knife between the moves. Josh Cesan should take credit for this spirited finale.

Jennifer Shennan, 15 October 2017

Featured image: Sir Jon Trimmer and William Fitzgerald in Lark from whY Cromozone. Tempo Dance Festival, 2017. Photo: © Amanda Billing

Emily Hancock, Oliver Carruthers and Atalya Loveridge in Douglas Wright's 'Knee Dance'. Photo Amanda Billing

The DANZ season of Limbs @ 40. Tempo Dance Festival

5 & 6 October 2017, Q Theatre, Auckland, Tempo Dance Festival

Reviewed by Jennifer Shennan

Tempo Dance Festival is an energising fortnight every October at the Q Theatre complex and surrounds, when Aucklanders have a sea of performances and workshops to navigate. This year’s theme marked important anniversaries in dance—Limbs Dance Company at 40, New Zealand School of Dance at 50, Northern Dance Network at 20. I’m a starter for that, since everything that happens is caused by what went before.

Limbs was formed in 1977 and directed by Mary Jane O’Reilly from 1978 so good to have her back as Artistic Director of this retrospective program. The first work, her own Poi, to music commissioned of Jack Body, is sustained and serious and beautiful and evocative and green. No actual poi are used but the curved and circular arm gestures at a range of rhythms and tempi bring them close. There are evocations too of the bird life in shaded fern and dappled bush (I remember a lovely lighting design in the original season). This work from 1983, reworked and extended in 1987, is available on dvd and makes an excellent educational resource. It was here well performed by seven dancers from Unitec Performing and Screen Arts program.

Next, from 1980, Melting Moments by Mark Baldwin, to Dvorak’s American string quartet is a rich and very red dance. Six dancers in three pairings—deep and slow, contained yet erotic, sensual and gorgeous—just as I remember it. It was here well performed by students from New Zealand School of Dance.

Talking Heads, by O’Reilly, to Seen and not seen from 1980, is a goofy hilarious quartet of wobbling robots who nod and jiggle their way around the stage. It needs a tight command of movement isolations, and sense of humour from all of us.

Then came Knee Dance, one of Douglas Wright’s classics, from 1982. To music by Laurie Anderson, this is a compelling work that dances out the magnetism and interdependence among three dancers—the invisible bonds of relationships made visible. In Wright’s choreography, each move grows out of the one that went before, so is both parent and child of itself. A miracle of a dance, here exceptionally well performed by Unitec dancers.

Perhaps Can is a sensuous solo for a skirted woman who does a kind of slow motion flamenco number to Miles Davis’ The Pan Piper. A reverie, made in 1979 by O’Reilly.

There’s a view which might see each of Douglas Wright’s works as talisman. Nonetheless, that would be a fair claim for Quartet, to Vivaldi, first performed in New York and in 1987 set on Limbs. I have colleagues in New York who still remember that early performance, and everything else Wright put on that program on the eve of his departing from the Paul Taylor company. It will always be New Zealand’s arts administrators and funders biggest, saddest mistake that they consistently failed to provide Douglas Wright with the resources to sustain a company and his repertoire produced over the decades. Instead we have provided many more dollars for much less talented choreographers. It is too late now, Wright has turned to literature and visual arts, so although no longer choreographic, his output continues to pour forth. (An interview on www.RadioNewZealand/Saturday with Kim Hill, September 2017, is a remarkable portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man—insightful, compassionate and well worth listening to).

Quartet, here performed by students from New Zealand School of Dance, perhaps needed more rehearsal time? Nonetheless we saw perfectly well what the work is, but it is additionally something to be truly grateful for—that Marianne Schultz, formerly a dancer with Limbs, and in the original cast of this work, has published a book on the history, repertoire and context of the company, in time for this 40th anniversary. It is her considerable achievement to include a close-up, gesture-by-move, limb-by-leap description of Wright’s choreography. That is a demanding and pedestrian task to set oneself and she does it faithfully and with great aplomb.

[Marianne Schultz, 2017. Limbs Dance Company—Dance for All People. 1977–1989]

Let the record stand. Audiences today can see what they missed. A Maori whakatauki or proverb has it that we walk backwards into the future. Despite the ephemerality of dance performance, we can see, to a degree and depending on our vision and our memory, what went before. We cannot see what hasn’t yet happened. History is not bunk. It’s all there is. It’s now two minutes in the past that I wrote that sentence. Your reading of it lies, one hopes, in the future, except that by the time you’ve read that, it too is past. Well done, all of us.

Jennifer Shennan, 14 October 2017

Featured image: Emily Hancock, Oliver Carruthers and Atalya Loveridge in Douglas Wright’s Knee Dance. Photo: © Amanda Billing

Dancers of QL2 in 'Not like the others', 2017. Photo Lorna Sim

Not like the others. QL2 Dance

13 October 2017, Theatre 3, Canberra

This year the annual Chaos Project from young Canberra dancers aged from 8 to 18 had the theme of difference. Alison Plevey, currently acting artistic director of QL2 Dance while Ruth Osborne is undertaking research overseas with a Churchill Fellowship, writes, ‘…it explores how we are the same, what makes us different, how do we feel about being different, do we feel pressure to do, think and look the same, and ultimately Not like the others celebrates the joy and power in difference. For young people, being able to be themselves and to feel comfortable in doing so, is critical and the dancers, whether they were 8 or 18, and whatever their level of emotional maturity, embraced the seven separate sections that made up Not like the others with gusto. Using dance as an educative tool is one of the great strengths of QL2 Dance

This year the three choreographers working on the show, Alison Plevey, Steve Gow and Jack Riley, made sure that in each section the theme was very clear. The younger group had a strong section, Square Peg, in which there was an exploration of how they saw themselves. ‘I was born in Canberra’ said one young dancer, and all those who identified in this way grouped themselves with her. Another dancer said ‘I can whistle through my teeth’ and the same thing happened, with appropriate accompaniment. And so on. It was a simple, but effective exploration of the theme, and was the work of Plevey.

I especially enjoyed the section by Steve Gow for an older group of dancers. Called ‘Virtual Identity’, it looked at social media as a way of conforming to expected notions about who we are: ‘Get the perfect picture’, ‘Write the perfect post’ and so on. Visually and choreographically Gow made an arresting statement about conformity and I admired the use of masks to get across the idea of conformity and the lighting (Kelly McGannon) of this section. Gow’s use of groups of dancers in constantly changing arrangements made this section simple but powerful.

Dancers of QL2 Dance in 'Virtual identity' from Not like the others, 2017. Photo: © Lorna Sim — Dancers of QL2 Dance in ‘Virtual identity’ from *Not like the others,* 2017. Photo: © Lorna Sim

Probably the most sophisticated section was Jack Riley’s ‘Allone’. It explored the idea of the power one person can have in society. Riley used probably the most senior of the dancers to examine this idea and made use of long wooden sticks as props to symbolise the roles one might have in society. I have admired Riley’s shorter works on previous occasions. In these situations, he has the ability to structure a work carefully and intelligently, and to use his widely varied movement experience to get his ideas across. ‘Allone’ was admirable and I suspect its relative brevity was to Riley’s benefit.

Dancers of QL2 Dance in 'Allone'. Photo Lorna Sim — Dancers of QL2 Dance in ‘Allone’ from *Not like the others*. Photo: © Lorna Sim

As ever, the closing sections of the QL2 show were expertly choreographed as a continuous part of the show. But the highlight of Not like the others was the strength of its message. Having a good idea for a show is one thing. But being able to put it across to an audience with the power that Plevey, her collaborators, and a bunch of young dancers did deserves much respect.

Michelle Potter, 14 October 2017

Louise Potiki-Bryant in 'Ngaro' Photo Tessa Chrisp

Ngaro. Tempo Dance Festival

4 October 2017. Q Theatre, Auckland. Tempo Dance Festival. Choreography Louise Potiki-Bryant

Reviewed by Jennifer Shennan

Louise Potiki-Bryant gave the premiere and sole performance of Ngaro, the solo work that results from her time on the prestigious Marti Friedlander Residency in New York. (Friedlander, a child orphan refugee to New Zealand from war-torn Europe, became one of the country’s leading photographers, and her portraits of New Zealand artists are the finest we have. Additionally, her bequest of this stimulating residency will ensure that her legacy continues, and how pleased she would be that a choreographer took up the challenge).

The word ‘ngaro’ in Maori means ‘hidden, out of sight, disappeared, absent, missing, lost, destroyed, consumed, passed into, undetected, unnoticed, passed off, passed away, subsided, forgotten, unintelligible, beaten, baffled, at a loss, distressed, oppressed, overcome by emotion, unavenged, unrequited, secretly’. Such are the riches of Maori vocabulary; there are also secondary and tertiary meanings—’fly, blowfly, supposed to represent the life or spirit of a person—or a roller used to drag a canoe—or a piece of wood set up for certain purposes’. It has a further meaning—’to be certain’. So there are all the words one needs to write about this.

This is an important, striking, dark, at times troubling work. Secrets are hinted at, troubles encountered, fears faced and not entirely conquered. There is a yearning … is that for a child? Was there a child not born? The work is enigmatic and its references and symbols tap into the interior of experiences. New York as a busy city full of people seems full of loneliness instead. Video clips are projected onto strip screens that slide across the stage like days and a night across the stage. The creative team—Potiki-Bryant & Paddy Free (video/sound) and Rona Ngahuia Osborne & Paddy Free (costume/set ) are a strong cohort bringing visual and audio depth and dimension to the production. I wish they too had come to share the curtain call.

There is extraordinary courage involved in mounting a work as personal as this one. I do think it a most inappropriate choice of Festival management to have billed it as the opening event of Tempo’s fortnight program however, and would have preferred it in an early evening slot with a quiet korero session to follow, rather than a reception with wine and cheese and chatter. Come the curtain call we had seen a tired, sad, exhausted slip of a woman talking a bow, a wan smile and then an exit. It just made you want to go after her, hug her, and assure her that everything will be alright. There’s a word for that in the dictionary too. It is ‘aroha’.

Jennifer Shennan, 14 October 2017