Piata opens the Tempo Dance Festival, Te Perenga o Tere 2024, in bold and fearsome tribal challenges, paired with an abstract human dance celebrating the innate and natural immune system subjected to cancel culture in current times.
Wai Taketake brings a large ensemble party, presented by the TuRongo Collective.
Canadian choreographer Anne Plamondon is presenting Myokine, bare and minimalist in staging, with just two others performing in shadow and light. Originally the performance had seven dancers.
Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, this year’s artistic director lays out a simple manifesto
It’s truly humbling to be invited to curate this wonderful festival this year, one I’ve participated in many times before. In serving our dance community, our NZDC whānau embodies a deep sense of aroha and manaaki in this kaitiaki role. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with our artists, audiences, and dance patrons to create a beautiful festival this year.
Wai Taketake
A powhiri has just concluded, a welcome for the dozen performances making up this year’s dance program,
We file back in, and it takes several minutes to realise the tall totem structure left of centre, which appears to be motionless, is seven performers in a close state of suspended animation.
It is a slow procession in, as the audience tonight appear to be in no hurry. The totem maintains its poise.
On the stage are many photos and portraits of family and friends long departed. Draped with small garlands or scarves. Greenstone and wooden carved artefacts are strewn through.
A procession of mourners file across the front of the stage. Generally black is the colour, although they may not necessarily feel black on the inside. Several young children and a baby.
A declamatory oration in te reo. Whilst I don’t know what is said, the tenor is an honouring and invocation addressing ancestors.
The description in the program challenges us to reflect on our connections and how they are perceived. Whether as sources of strength or as threats by those who fear our deep, unapologetic ties to ancestry and identity.
Mourners file off and the ancient ones come to life.
Powerful stylised combat dance, with mere and patu weapons and long sticks standing in for taiaha.
A woman is ritually dismembered and brought back to life.
Recognisable and familiar to the world as the All Black haka.
I attended the recent event at Eden Park where Kiwis took back the world record haka performance (over 6500).
In the stands it was a grand spectacle. On the turf, the energy generated was powerful and liberating in emotion. It seemed to engulf everyone from children to grandparents. Many ethnicities attended.
Returning to the stage, the performance is undeniably violent, as it is stripped back to its visceral core. Fierce combat and the men are covered in sweat like loose forwards.
A large part of human awakening into intelligence comes from terrible violence. The dance echoes the opening act of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The femur bone tossed in the air tracks immediately into a space vessel.
The present-day mourners return briefly, a father telling his daughter to make sure she cleanses to close the portal. The only part spoken in English.
Denouement involves a long discourse in te reo by one of the ancient warriors, as the treasures and artefacts are taken back.
Later a teenager tells me the talk was a general thank-you to all, and a welcome from the local tribes.
Myokine
Creator and choreographer from Canada, Anne Plamondon is joined by Justin Rapaport and Raphaelle Ann Sealhunter.
Lighting is dim for at least half the performance. No other visual contexts. The lithe and agile movement of the trio is before us as an abstract painting.
At times the body seems to constrict in a pathological fashion, like an android that is malfunctioning inside its software (Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner)
Movement become fluid and smooth again and the soft machines break out of their constrictions. They move with the grace of Olympic gymnasts again.
The physicality of movements matches that of the prior performance, with the tone of violence reduced to deep inside the body.
Myokines are part of a class of proteins and glycoproteins called cytokines, which make up the immense and complex natural and innate immune system of the body.
This is the vital part of the operating system of the soft machines.
Myokines come from skeletal muscle cells, and receptors are found through all the organs of the body, including the brain. Certain types are intimately linked to regulating emerging cancers.
In recent times a certain therapy was mandated throughout the world, which short-circuited this endogenous protective mechanism.
Myokine the dance could be the artistic response to send the healing code out to the world. A patch to mend the operating system.
Piata is the ancient and the modern intertwined in dance.
Rev. Orange Peel
