Dance Your Socks Off! An Overview Sept 2004

By Lyne Pringle

September is the month for the Dance Your Socks Off! Festival in Wellington and has been for eight years now. Andy Nelson from the Wellington City Council has been a driving force in the substantial growth of the festival in recent times. Whilst the professional sector – myself included – tend to grumble about the ‘jolly hockey sticks’ tone of the title, there is also a realization that this broad based event does serve more than just the contemporary dance folks. This is its strength and there is the potential to widen the audience catchments for all involved.

I suspect that a festival within a festival for the professional sector will evolve – in essence Bats serves as the venue for this: Andy is in dialogue with Adam Hayward from The Body festival in Christchurch about developing links. All good, as these festivals are now providing stable frameworks that artists can link to and audiences can be guided to anticipate, plan for and participate with surety; sampling widely and broadening the dance palette. Time will tell, participants from out of town need to keep coming back to build that audience. Debate will always rage around whether festivals are a good idea. I think they are.

Courtenay Central is a garish public arena where the event kicks off with dance groups afforded the opportunity to present a ‘sampler’ free to the punters and from there it is all on, 53 events over 3 weeks!

Murray Lynch at Downstage continues to support dance and Raewyn Hill by taking the risk of programming Angels with Dirty Feet. Bravo! It was a success. Bats gets in behind the idea by presenting 3 weeks of dance and physical theatre events; Wings Co-operative’s Rush Hour propelled by the effervescent Sacha Copeland, Fiona Truelove’s sttunning Leaving the Underworld, Massif’s exploration of the madness of mountain climbing Shack and Paddock, Guy Ryan’s poetic The Fall Guy.

The Feet with Heat extravaganza fills up the Westpac St James with a fizzing dance spectacular featuring a cast of 183 dancers mainly from private sector dance studios – a fabulous opportunity to experience the splendour of this sumptuous theatre. Dances from around the planet remind us of the origins of this form of expression.

From overseas The Festival of Russian Ballet at The Opera House drew in the crowds. The practice of opening up the studio for scrutiny is catching on with The New Zealand School of Dance, The Royal New Zealand Ballet, Deirdre Tarrant and Paula Hunt inviting people in. Roll Again Baby took some madness to a variety of sites around the city; people in cars at the intersection of Taranaki and Vivian streets were possibly the most bemused!

The Festival is presented in two sections “ To See” which I have just outlined and “To Do”. The latter being a pretty mind boggling array of opportunities to move the body in a variety of ways. Workshops in ; Bharatanatyam from the imitable Vivek Kinra, Balinese, Salsa, Swing, Capoeira, Improv, Ceilidh, South African, Ballroom, Folkdance, Tango, Rock n Roll, Polish, Hip Hop and Scottish Country Dancing offer the potential to take participants into a new bodily realm.

Dance Your Socks Off is serving the dance community well by building links between sectors which in the long run I am sure will lead to greater audiences, participation and visibility for the art form. I don’t have the exact figures but word has it that a lot of people get into the act! Contemporary dance risks extinction if it doesn’t connect with this grass roots population.

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