DANZ QUARTERLY - No 8 July, August, September 2007

Reviews

Dance and AK'07

Reviewed by by Raewyn Whyte

Auckland Festival 2007 was a huge step up from AK'03 and Ak'05, considerably more international and more diverse in its array of selected artists and productions, and resolutely contemporary in its programming of dance, theatre, music, forums, visual arts (including the Turbulence triennial), film, Spiegeltent entertainment, and family-focused events. It created a buzz in and around the city which previous festivals failed to achieve, and healthy attendances were achieved across the board.

The five works in the dance programme offered a disparate array of current styles and approaches to choreography and performance.

Two works were tried and true -- the intimately-scaled Terrain from Rifleman Productions, a charmingly allusive object-based subtly-nuanced two-hander designed for a tiny performance area and an audience of 32; and the opera-house scale international festival touring work Les 4 saisons from French company Ballet Preljocaj, a sunnily whimsical pure dance work for 12 dancers set to Vivaldi's violin concerto of the same name.

The other three works were brand new and raised issues of concern to humanity, also arousing heated critical debate in an expanding roster of online, broadcast and print publications - reviews of varying lengths were found in the NZ Herald, NZ Listener, Theatreview, Lumiere Reader, Metro Online and on Radio New Zealand National, plus extended discussions took place on Upbeat, Radio New Zealand Concert's afternoon show.

Lemi Ponifasio's three-act Tempest was still in progress towards a May premiere in Vienna, one of a series of works from around the world inspired by Shakespeare's plays. Embracing the moral imperative in his artmaking, Ponifasio and his cast -- the male dancers of Mau plus guest performers Tame Iti and Ahmed Zaoui - presented compellingly persuasive testimony about social injustice in the South Pacific, delivering the text through culturally-based oratory (Maori and English) and subtly nuanced Pacific dances -- the intricate patterns and flashing head and hand gestures of Kiribati traditions plus haka taparahi and haka peruperu -- here with discharged shotgun. In common with Shakespeare's original, this Tempest raised issues to do with the question of justice - how it is determined, how to restore justice when it has been usurped; how the rightness of a case can best be constructed and communicated, and hoy best it can be delivered in such that an audience will assess the rightness of the cause.

Global warning provided the context for Dark Tourists, a dance theatre work which faced some aspects of future human existence which most of us care not to envisage though we will all undoubtedly during our lifetimes face them for real.. Choreographed by Malia Johnston in collaboration with theatre director Emma Willis and composer/musician Eden Mulholland plus the cast of seven performers, this was set in the not so distant future, when the last of the birds are falling from the skies, and extinction is staring us all in the face. A mere handful of isolated, wary people survive on the fringes of the ocean shores, forming a tenuous community with a cyclic existence based around scavenging for sustenance and hoping against hope that optimism might appear on the horizon. And in their midst, occasional strangers appear -- tourists perpetually seeking "the place it happened" and any opportunity for one last experience of rarity and dangerous beauty, no matter what it may cost..

Images of war, murder, abuse, famine, destruction, harassment, tyranny, misogyny, and a gritty determination to survive at all costs were at the heart of Neil Ieremia's amata, a sprawling action-packed work for the newly reconstituted Black Grace, now comprised of recent dance graduates -- 12 young women, one young man - plus Ieremia himself.. After opening with a solo by Ieremia and a bitter monologue about how men must be (self-disciplined, self-restrained, staunch, stoic, sad so on); then followed by a solo for the younger man, the rest of the dancing was 99% female ensemble work, with wave upon wave of rhythmically driven patterns sweeping across the floor and back again in flurries of interlaced steps and falls and rolls and rises which leave little room for individuality. Any woman who dares to stand against the juggernaut is knocked down by its passing, and she quickly learns to comply with its demands

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