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"Made in New Zealand" - Footnote Dance Company 2010

Author: Felicity Molloy

Email: mollyf@yahoo.co.nz

Publication: Siedstep

Publication Date: 20 May 2010

Subject: Footnote at Sky City Theatre, Auckland

Footnote's founding director Deirdre Tarrant presents a new show each year in Auckland's Sky City Theatre. She slips her company through the whole country with as much regularity, panache and solidarity as the New Zealand Ballet Company. We accept Footnote as an intrinsically New Zealand company, and it is exquisite to watch the high calibre dancers perform their hearts out. Yet the programme title raises an important question about what it is that surfaces from a global culture yet gets labeled Made in New Zealand.

Footnote's dance works are always more than a smorgasbord - a feast: new, provocative and thoughtful, consistently responsive to the latest dance trends, and cleverly exposing better and better dancers. Six core dancers, Anita Hunziker, Sarah Knox, Lucy Marinkovich, Francis Christeller, Robbie Curtis, Jeremy Poi and two guests, Jesse Wikiriwhi and Yanhao Du, bring to life four of the country's finest choreographies initiated â€œto celebrate New Zealand culture through matching original New Zealand dance works with homegrown music."

First up, Purlieu takes us though the endless web of Malia Johnston's delicate perception. A programme announcement prior to the performance about her previous work, Miniatures, reminds me that all dance works inevitably build from a previous influence. Much as Miniatures explored the lightness of a dancer's tread on the planet, this work succumbs to flight themes: dancers are lifted and balanced so very precariously on chunky blocks. With the particularly edgy sounds of Eden Mulholland set once more as a sensitive backdrop, Johnston's movement inscribes a precious earthly state; a thoughtful sorrow about future generations and issues of global survival.

Guest Yanhao Du starts and finishes the work with lissome movement, in the closing section moving from front to the back of stage as though his recession fashions the frame of a relentless quest for the boundaries of a new generational voice. The critical art display of gesture, physicality and emotionality in Purlieu evokes in me the sense that the dancersâ€™ footprint is not so much invisible in New Zealand as made disturbingly ephemeral by Johnston's footwork.

The second work, I changed, is another example of exploring generational perspectives of difference. As much as her national predecessors challenged changing social grids, Sarah Foster transcends contemporary dance as theatre and positions herself perfectly as an idiosyncratic artist expressing a more youthful developing society. The first moment of the dance sends a dancer/ bystander off in disgust. From then, the tangled threads of movement provide a densely woven tale of teen communication and alter-worldliness. Self conscious - yes but, with much left unsaid about how young adults think and people the world at large - in spite of the gurgle of obvious statements that are littered as script, Foster brings forth an important and original work. The solo danced with leggy abandon by Sarah Knox to recorded baby sounds prompts the realisation: it is the issues of youth being observed here that make this programme intrinsically "made" in New Zealand.

Footnote's selection of works from their recent repertoire makes this a slightly longer programme and catching the audience unawares, tips a number out of their seats into intermission when they should still be seated. Unfortunately for dancer Jeremy Poi, this interrupted the opening of his solo Stealth, set to music by Jody Lloyd, by choreographer Ross McCormack. The flat painted canvas used as his personal backdrop, although deeply and obviously metaphorical of this wonderful dancer's capability, also tended to mask the quick, huddled non-specific movements he was given to "make". I had been looking forward to the particular emotional literalism that hallmarks Poi's performances. Regrettably, this disarrayed timing in the programme denied him the zenith of the night.

I am relieved to have finally seen MTYland, fresh from the New Zealand International Festival of Arts. Perhaps one day this work will resurface in a retrospective purview of choreographic purpose in this country. Choreographer, Claire O'Neil, like Johnston, develops sequences and phrases from a pure raft of skill and artistry. Both the sonic, sensual build of an eclectic range of songs and music by Herman Martin of the avant-hop/ electro-rock-crossover band, Battles, and the dancers' nonchalant mastery of movement in the work makes this an occasion that marks the critical voice of New Zealand dance. Anita Hunziker and returning guest Jesse Wikiriwhi deserve special mention as performers who embrace the normalcy of contemporary dance as a language all its own.

Footnote's dancers come from New Zealand, Australia and China, and though the choreographers are also from New Zealand, two are based in Europe. I am not sure that any of this actually matters in relation to my initial question, because the warm response from Footnote's discerning audience to their creative output is surely acknowledgement of their performing collective messages. Footnote dance is contemporary art made in New Zealand that bespeaks a world of hope for the next generations who engage with societal divergence and imaginative endeavour.

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