DANZ QUARTERLY No 7 April 2007

Reviews

Bucket Head- The Lost Child: Another spin by Tania Crow in the showing Shift
Luxembourg Gardens, Auckland

Reviewed by Alexa Wilson

In a fledgling venue space already pregnant with possibility as well as residue and decay, such as downtown Auckland’s Luxembourg Gardens, Tania Crow’s work was skillfully realised within highly original and avant-garde choreography introducing potent themes of death and rebirth. It fused ideas and experiences in evocative, ephemeral and layered ways, using a variety of subterranean performance techniques to communicate intricacies of familial suffering, loss and abandonment.

 Intersecting the forms of performance art, physical theatre, Butoh and somatic investigations, it engaged the audience in a slow moving and powerfully intriguing disclosure of themes which involved a diversity of performers all seemingly alienated from one other but caught up nonetheless in the metaphor of ‘the black hole’.

An image of abortion was induced somewhere inside this world. It was the final tableau which most obviously indicated the image of a dysfunctional ‘family portrait’ in a consciously token manner, bringing all disparate characters together in a powerful moment of ironic cohesion, which had Tania hanging upside down in a fetal position over the other actress’s womb. Images of unwanted children, emotionally violent authority figures, residual trauma all encompassed in the expanding metaphor of the universal and personal/political ‘black hole’ created a slow revealing dark portrait of a world consumed by alienation and rejection, all alchemised within a haunting beauty of all performances, and choreography which seemingly bamboozled the audience in its veiled and obscure gestures whilst aiming to be reborn with more hope.

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