Whenua is contemporary dance from the New Zealand Dance Company, informed by the turbulent and creative forces of this land. Often beautiful and rhythmic in harmony, also boiling over into some powerful visceral performances.
The Players: Katie Rudd, Brydie Colquhoun, Bianca Hyslop, ‘Isope ‘Akau’ola, Kosta Bogoievski, Jeremy Beck
We first experience Imprint in this game of two halves.
The choreographers are Rodney Bell and Malia Johnston. As the prelude we see the image of Bell on the huge white backdrop, wheeling himself across the screen.
He became paraplegic in 1991 through a motorcycle accident. Since that time, he has established himself as a dancer. Over the course he has worked with disabled artists.
The performance proper begins when Bell faces the audience, still on the screen, and tells us…I need to be more me, and you need to be more yourself.
That is a challenge.
If there was one important revelation from the disaster of the human spirit that was initiated in the viral plague commencing 2020, it was the revealing of people’s true faces behind their masks. Those paper muzzles became symbolic of oppressive authority.
Everybody brings their own lived experience to the dance. It is about imprint and the impact we have on the world.
Imprinting comes from observational animal experiments pioneered by academics Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergin. What determines individual and societal behaviour within a group. This is protective and gives empowerment, but it is also restrictive in expressions of identity.
The opening sequence starts with embraces. One partner slips away and another fits themselves sinuously inside, to maintain the contact.
They are beautiful bodies, and movements are smooth and fluid.
They form up in clusters and tangles, and then separate and scatter out.
A large white tarpaulin which covers half the floor space has the players swimming through it, or wrapping themselves as if it is a giant comforter.
Musical composition by Eden Mulholland at times sound like the collage landscapes of Laurie Anderson.
Maybe her celebrated song, O Superman, is about imprinting at its core. O Superman, o Judge/ O Mom and Dad/ So hold me Mom, in your long arms.
It is a joyful and exuberant performance.
Uku – Behind the Canvas is the second half of the evening and is the more challenging of the performances.
Choreographer Eddie Elliott first presented this dance performance in 2022, to general acclaim.
The story is loosely taken from Māori mythology and the legends of Tane-Mahuta and his creation of the Earth’s first woman, Hineahuone.
It is clearly the enactment of a birth process, and it is presented as messy, loud, visceral, and dangerous.
This puts me right back in a previous life as a health professional. An imminent sense of disaster and all your emotions and senses are on high alert as you are a player in the most dangerous time of a person’s existence. When they enter the physical realm and death appears just as close as life. For mother and baby.
The three female dancers have the strongest voices. They are in control, then they lose control and become wild and possessed.
Enacting the creation of the Anima spirit, and Animus has opened a Pandora’s box.
The stage is bare. There is a massive backdrop which look like the walls of a giant dungeon. Grey, grimy and messy as if it’s a place of incarceration and unspeakable brutality.
Players smear themselves and each other with clay. There is an extended sequence where the male player is becoming ecstatic and stoned on grabbing handful of this mud, whilst the woman beside him is shrieking and dissembling.
At the bridge of the performance, you hear voices lambasting and criticizing the performers.
There is nervous laughter, as it appears to come from the audience. It does not.
This is a tension-breaker, and it does provide some respite.
Players are portraying violence which they maintain within the discipline of dance. It would take as much physical beating as a professional rugby game.
There are hakas performed. Repeated references are made to land rights and who has the spiritual connection and ownership.
The spectre of colonisation and the violence around that is present in its starkness. It is recent history and is a defining part of New Zealand as much as the Civil War is to America.
It is exhausting for the observer. You sense the smell of blood, mud, and body fluids.
Whenua is exhilarating and challenging, and the imprint of the performances can invade and live in your psyche.
Rev. Orange Peel
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