Lula Washington Dance Theatre is a thrilling spectacle of contemporary dance. Provocative, fierce and distinctly American. Feel the Funk y’all!
One of the highlights of Auckland Arts Festival 2025.
Lula Washington founded this company in Los Angeles 1980 with her journalist and playwriting partner. From inception, one aim was to provide opportunities and pathways for young people from poorer backgrounds to enter this art discipline. Naturally these are Black and Hispanic communities.
She struck these same obstacles when trying to get a foothold in professional dance world. Apparently 22 was too old to become an apprentice. Persistent and insistent enough to turn those into an eventual yes.
She celebrates her 70+ birthday on stage with her crew, acknowledging the long and successful journey.
Rhythm’n’Blues and Jazz are at the forefront of all the pieces, becoming more avant-garde and spiritual as the show progresses.
Images of lynchings and suspended bodies are difficult to confront, sending shivers and jolts.
Dancers are fluid in energy and whip themselves around, counterpointed with slow moving grace.
America is raw with emotional turbulence and racial tensions. This is a cyclical process. Trayvon Martin and George Floyd’s death are invoked. From Martin the Black Lives Matter movement began.
A dancer stands on a bare stage and screams repeatedly. Stop! Killing! Meeeee! Eventually he’s comforted by a female, and his whimpers then become one of resignation.
Mental images of Emmett Till are there in the shadows. There are many violent acts, but one can stand as pivot point.
Masks are mechanisms of adaptation. A lone female dancer appears with a rubbery visage which could be mixed race.
All angular movements and voodoo trance dance, the perpetual smile makes her appear beatific.
Accompanied by a Jazz drummer who seems to play several rhythmic lines simultaneously, accelerating with fusion energy at will.
At times she matches this with her elastic tics, at others it is too fast. As if the drummer is giving her animation.
Finally, she loses the mask with a struggle. Other dancers appear and there’s the impression of liberated movement.
The following performance is built around a famous Pharoah Sanders composition The Creator Has a Master Plan.
Sanders started playing with John Coltrane in the early Sixties about the same time he was breaking through with atonal Free Jazz and bringing spiritual energy into the field.
Dancers glide in skirls and whirls. Agitation as the discordant saxophones screeching increases. Music is the original recording I imagine, a little truncated.
Awareness is relaxation. This comes in the form of seven long pieces of fabric, representing the seven chakras of the human body. They wrap around dancers and become shrouds. Agitation settles. A seismic graph becomes harmonic waves.
Peace and happiness for every man. The mantra heard at the end of the long piece. There is tension in the music and the bodies, but it finally connects with a home on high.
The concluding piece is purely joyful music with performers breaking out with smoothest Hip-Hop and breakdance moves.
Graceful and smooth like Gene Kelly. Not quite the passionate church testifying of Black Gospel going secular like Jackie Wilson or James Brown.
Smooth athleticism is exhilarating to watch, and we are left with a benediction.
Certainly not doom and gloom in America, despite the tantrums and wailing of the Left. Lula Washington Dance Company are brave to search deep in the psyche to confront demons of racism.
Then they lead us out hopeful, and maybe confident, of Martin Luther Kings promised land.
Rev. Orange Peel
Lula Washington Dance performs at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre. Tickets for tonight’s final performance are still available HERE.
