Home, Land and Sea. Royal New Zealand Ballet (with guests from New Zealand Dance Company)

24 July 2025, St James Theatre, Wellington
reviewed by Jennifer Shennan

The Way Alone—Stephen Baynes/P. Tchaikovsky
Chrysalis—Shaun James Kelly/Philip Glass
Home, Land and Sea—Moss Te Ururangi Patterson/Shayne Carter

This triple bill hits the mark in more ways than three. Production values and galvanised performances reveal the company in high morale, with the artistic management in steady yet adventurous command. The dancers and the audience are stimulated by the contrasts of aesthetics, musicality and substance of the three works.

Choreographer Stephen Baynes has a career-long association with Australian Ballet, although his works are also in repertoires of companies worldwide. The Way Alone was commissioned in 2008 by Hong Kong Ballet for an all-Tchaikovsky program, and uses excerpts from lesser known compositions of choral, organ and piano forces that create a meditative atmosphere. 13 dancers form the ensemble, which divides into duos and trios and an occasional solo, where Katherine Minor has a notable role. The theme is clued in the title—members may be part of a large group but at the same time remain as individuals, as in a church congregation for example, or a theatre audience, together alone. There is a lyrical and serene quality to the movement, all effort is hidden, with lifts and upreaching gestures suggesting that gravity has no hold here. Eye contact is made with the audience only at the end. The work is beautifully danced throughout, and the lighting design by Jon Buswell shines beams of soft light from on high, to heavenly effect.

Shaun James Kelly is a dancer and resident choreographer at RNZB. In this premiere, Chrysalis, he collaborates with designer Rory William Docherty to explore the metaphor of layered clothing, what that might say of a person wearing it, or be revealed as layers are removed. The work opens with a tribute to Shaun’s parents and the longevity of their relationship. Hats and coats are styled for 1950s, soon removed then placed on coathangers that are raised high above the stage—suggesting the passing of time and changing of fashions. Party attire is worn and enjoyed … these layers too are removed and lifted away, revealing bodytights in various shades of nacreous lustre. The work is set to piano music by Philip Glass, with minimalist motifs repeated to build effect. Several short passages are danced in silence which suggests that sound too can be layered. Danced connections between couples and friends reference the value in personal freedom and the confidence to express gender identity. The cast of ten dancers move with style and commitment in the combination of familiar and new ballet vocabulary, and Shaun will have been rightly pleased that his work is delivered with such aplomb.

Home, Land and Sea, another premiere, brings the choreography of Moss Patterson to a new level of urgency. Shayne Carter, highly regarded for his performing and composing in a wide-ranging musical scene, has created a richly evocative music score with natural landscapes and Maori cultural references drawn in. His strong composition drives this highly successful collaboration, and his program notes on the experience of working with dancers are among the best you will read.

The cast comprises six RNZB dancers with six members of New Zealand Dance Company in a combination that melds their classical and contemporary dance trainings. These were never opposite techniques but the give and take between them can produce versatility in some dancers, most notably seen here in the intensely invested performances by Zacharie Dun, Kirby Selchow and Ana Gallardo Lobaina.

At times the dance pace is relentless but its effect is always controlled and tempered. It is maintained not because shouting achieves anything but rather, because momentum is everything and there’s important work to be done. There is in the choreography an aspect of polemic against the country’s current troubling political shifts that demote Maori needs, that lessen respect accorded to the Treaty of Waitangi as the nation’s founding reference, that downgrade the status of te reo (language), that disestablish positions of government historians, and more besides.

Politicians we could name should see this work and reflect on the divisive and mean-spirited ways they are trying to attract support for policies that move us backwards not forwards in the essential quest for intercultural respect and connection. It’s doubtful of course if they’d get anything out of it since folk mostly hear only what they want to hear, so better to save the resources and ensure instead that a quality film is made of this work. Alun Bollinger or Chris Graves on camera would know how to capture that. This is choreography that offers dialogue and conversation. Film can reach far beyond a company’s touring itinerary, and ours is not the only country that needs to raise and pursue awareness of such challenges.

Ka nui te aroha mo tēnei tūtaki. (Let’s recognise this title work as an important bi-cultural encounter). The power of haka and the poetry of ballet are complementary and it’s Patterson’s and Carter’s shared triumph to have presented a template for mutual exchange, not confrontation or competition. Jon Buswell’s design uses a set of panels onto which are first projected harakeke/flax weaving patterns, then grasses in the wind, to scenes of the sea, with its foam rising, which discreetly but miraculously slowly turns into a long white cloud, and there you have it, Ao-tea-roa, the name of the country we live in.

There is an interesting list of the times, starting in 1953, that New Zealand’s ballet company has looked for echoes between ballet and Maori dance, but that account lies outside the scope of this review.

I found it very affecting that Patterson uses a dynamic range of movement harnessing at times the power of haka and merging it with the clarity of alignment in classically trained dancers. He waits till near the end to include stylized versions of ringa (hand and arm movement) that characterise Maori dance, delivered in miniature with carved clarity by all the dancers. He then moves towards the work’s peace-making denouement by using the exquisite wiri (the shimmering quivering of arms and hands) that signal the life force in Maori worldview.

The curtain call remains in character—a linked line of dancers rippling as waves of the sea. Such a cadence is worth more to me than perhaps it sounds, and I wish that happened more often. It in turn evokes Wislawa Symborska’s famous poem, Theatre Impressions, in which, despite any preceding scenes of heroic struggle or battle, it’s the curtain call that grabs you by the throat.

Home, Land and Sea, with that talisman curtain call, shows a way that ballet can do its work, in a relevant time and place. Hei konei rā (For here, there).

Jennifer Shennan, 26 July 2025

Postscript: In the interval I learned in a text of the passing of Philippa Ward, well-known and much-loved Wellington pianist and dance aficionado. (She had been rehearsal pianist for the Stravinsky Pulcinella I choreographed 40 years ago, and remembered details of that production all these decades since. Such appreciation of an ephemeral art is rare.) No choreographer could synchronise this timing but Baynes may be moved to learn that Philippa quietly departed as Tchaikovsky piano music was being played in The Way Alone. This is another of the ways ballet can do its work. JS

Featured image: Ana Gallardo Lobaina and Zacharie Dun in The Way Alone. Photo: © Stephen A’Court