Heilung – Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, 16 November 2024: Review & Photo Gallery

Rev Orange Peel and Photos by Leonie Moreland

17th November 2024

Heilung bring their primordial ritual energy field to New Zealand, contemporary theatrical dance and ancient pagan music which casts healing spells.

Their name being Germanic for healing.

Local iwi are on stage with a powhiri and a powerful greeting haka, prefaced by a wailing lamenting waiata.

There follows a long opening sequence to summon the earth and forest spirits. Chanting incantations as the players gather.

Smoke machines and metaphorical mirrors. Birds sing and dried herbs and leaves are burnt as incense to cleanse the auditorium.

It is a Midsummer Night’s open-air theatre of charms and rituals, all of which develop into the invocation of ancient spirits and beings. It may even have an air of Midsommar.

The essential nucleus of Heilung are Christopher Juul (Danish music producer), Kai Uwe Faust (German tattoo artist) and Maria Franz (German Folk singer). Founded the project in Copenhagen in 2014.

They seek to recreate the ancient pagan music of Europe. The interview gives an idea of what elements make up this vast project. Then to perform them in a modern setting.

An act of reincarnation and reanimation. Once everybody is in, the ceremony is about to begin.

There are numerous audience members dressed in ancient pelts and blowing tribal bone horns. Help to create the scene prior, and after the show.

The spectacle hits you like the central occult invocation which forms the core of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Both exhilarating and dangerous.

Three sets of tribal thumping drums. James Brown did that in his last show in New Zealand. All human cultures have used animal skins stretched over a resonator as the origin point of music.

Helmets with antlers. Veil masks decorated by bones and feathers. Big tusk horns. Swords and knives.

They bring on Viking soldiers with leather shields and spears. Their marching is a low rumble from the stage.

Third song in is Alfadhirhaiti. The two men perform in fierce, guttural Mongolian and Tibetan style throat singing. The deep gravelly, vocal cord shredding style.

The Mongols also brought their cultural imprint into Northen Europe as habitual marauders.

This is why they are labelled as Viking Metal, although their music is not contained in those boundaries. Heavy male rumble voices have a similarity to the Samoan Metal of Shepherds Reign.

With the dense smoke and soldiers in silhouette, this feels like the music from the battlefield. After fierce battles and bodies in piles.

Last time I experienced that was a violent and nasty Sweetwaters festival in Ngāruawāhia 1982. Performers getting bottled, alcohol-fuelled violence, fires lit on the hills. Young males on testosterone highs.

You get the sense of blood and sweat. Wolves in the audience continually bay and howl. They could be werewolves.

There is sequence where a woman is ritually tied up and sacrificed by a spear. Brought back to life by another.

It takes an hour before I appreciate the continual background drone. Where does it come from? The band have explained it as music they record from the natural habitat. It has a curiously soothing and comforting effect.

Franz is the principle female voice, helped by two other women on backing vocals. She has a high keening Folk soprano.

When they combine, they can rise in the same arch intensity and otherworldliness of the great Bulgarian female choirs.

Traust and they become the three witches of MacBeth. Wild keening vocals makes a stunning spectacle.

Elddansurinn. Three deathly pale guys crab dance around and look like a few Gollum characters have escaped from the Lord of the Rings show next door at the Civic Theatre.

The shadow warriors return and for a moment, you feel the band has harnessed the weather as if we are watching a Kurosawa movie come to the theatre stage.

Their instruments are not plugged in, but they are amplified through microphones.

I see an old, bowed instrument which could be a ravanahatha, an ancient precursor to the sitar originating from Rajasthan, India.

Eivør plays the support slot tonight. An incredible and arresting soprano voice, her top range pierces like a hot wire cutting through a block of ice.

Eivør Palsdottir comes from the Faroe Islands, so she has some connection to nearby Iceland.

At first, she sang in the Wuthering Heights Folk Pop style of Kate Bush, but then she climbs higher in a pure tone operatic style. Even more remarkable is that she has no vibrato.

She commented during her set that Kiri Te Kanawa is one of her favourites.

Enn has her expanding the vocal range on the opening to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song. This is matched to the to a drummer who can thunder with the hammer of the gods in John Bonham style.

Incredible and awesome. We are going to catch her again soon with her own headline gig in three days’ time.

She is Nordic blonde, but she does resemble Lindsay Lohan in her better days.

Heilung get closest to recognisable Metal with Galgadr. The dance part of this has Franz sitting of a Game of Thrones like Circe.

Varied percussion instruments including a bodhran, bones and what sounds like tablas. This is for Elddansurin, and it includes an extended fire dance. Fire walk with me.

We get a mediaeval mosh pit with the closing song Hamrer Hippyyer. Scattered distorted voices as if going through an old Leslie speaker.

Everyone comes back on, soldiers and haka-performing iwi included. A big shamanistic trance dance with whirling dervishes.