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Watershed Next Wave Festival 1996

Author: Raewyn Whyte

Email: raewyn@url.co.nz

Publication: NZ Listener

Publication Date: 10 June 1996

Subject: Watershed Next Wave Festival 1996, 23 May - 1 June

Auckland's second annual Next Wave Dance Festival, running at The Watershed 23 May to 1 June, was a great success. There were sizeable audiences for all 6pm, 8pm and 10pm shows, with plenty of animated and enthusiastic after-show discussion in the theatre lobby. Eight different prorgammes presented over the ten nights of the season made evident the wide array of styles and approaches which currently comprise contemporary dance in New Zealand. A tangible aura of intrigue attended every event, from short experimental works by fledgling choreographers, to evening-length presentations by dancers with considerable international experience. With dancers returning from overseas and coming from Wellington and points south to perform, the festival as a whole made evident the depth of talent and expertise within the New Zealand dance community.

As in last year's festival, most were solos and duets. Footnote Dance Company was the exception, with their brand new Shona McCullagh work, "The Pelt, the Pork and the Princess" for six dancers. With powerful music by John Gibson intercut with segments from Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto, and Sinead O'Connor's Someday My Prince Will Come, this vigorous, technically challenging narrative work showed the company at their best.

Personal experiences and family stories were at the heart of many of the new works, making it easier for audiences to engage with the dancing. Collaborations between choreographers and artists in other disciplines also featured, and made for richly layered viewing experiences.

Most satisfyingly, Josie Thompson's autobiographical "This is not a Solo Show" was presented with entrancing music by Mark Austin and against an often dreamlike video backdrop filmed by life-partner Peter Tait, with live mixing by multimedia artist Michael Hodgson. Taking its focus on her passage through adolescence into motherhood, this employed an extraordinary array of everyday objects to signal the issues of her life.

Equally compellingly but minus the multimedia layers, Warwick Long's "Stepping Ashore" was framed by a series of rocks and small stones, a length of mooring rope, and a bevy of teapots of the size associated with church halls. As he moved these objects around, Long evocatively pieced together fragments of the life of the grandfather he had never known, sharing with us the secret stories passed down from one generation to the next.

Other highlights included Maaka's gorgeous film of KareKare Beach which brought the ocean into the theatre for Alison East's "How Being Still is Moving", Joan Laage's Butoh improvisation, "Waiting for Butoh", in collaboration with musician Paul Hewitt and with audience contributions, and Olive Bieringa's elemental "Sulphuric Love Dive", complete with sulphur fumes, fire, ash, water, earth, and complementary rocks.

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