Amid their full schedule of work in schools around the country, Footnote Dance Company has presented its Forte Season 2006, for adults, in single performances at large theatres in Christchurch, Dunedin and Wellington with two works choreographed by Raewyn Hill.

In Time of Flight, first created for Footnote’s 2003 season, captures selectively lit glimpses of movement in a hazy twilight zone. Inspired by poet Pablo Neruda’s To Sadness II, Hill takes her dancers to an ‘incredible lightness of being’ through Nic McGowan’s exquisite score. The question remains: are they arriving or departing?

At 12 minutes, Time of Flight gets away with simply depicting a state of being without outstaying its welcome. It is a bit strange, though, that it takes less time than the interval that follows.

Here Lies within develops the theme Hill first explored with Footnote last year in How Ugly is that Duckling. Indeed a detailed version on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale is read aloud at length, by Anita Hunziker, as everyone walks very slowly forward, adding witting asides or strange little yelps.

Despite being about “the contemporary obsession with physical perfection” Here Lies within (which may also be heard as Hear Lies …) avoids any acknowledgement of precedents like Narcissus of Greek mythology and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It opts instead for a series of send-up sketches threaded on a through-line of inner beauty, depicted by two women dancers to Douglas Lilburn’s haunting ‘Canzona for Strings Nos 1 & 2’.

For me this contradicts the social critique because Halina Wolyncewicz and Sarah Knox are outwardly young, beautiful, fit, trim and healthy, and must be so to do their job. Also their dancing, lovely as it is in flimsy white slips, suggests a self-absorbed introspection that could be just as problematical as the obsession being satirised.

My companion says the point is that inner beauty remains pure and unadorned while inordinate efforts are being made – by the others at make-up table upstage – to achieve beauty by adding external features. Fair enough. I might have got that if there had been a clearer sense of conflict between the inner and outer dimensions. But there isn’t, and because nothing develops much with each return of the inner beauties, the repetition does become a bit tedious, through no fault of the dancers.

By contrast the ‘baddies’, mostly in black suits or mini frocks, apart from a doll-like white bride (Hannah Stannard), are more entertaining as they variously succumb to the pressures and attempt to keep up with the trends. Especially memorable is Lance Riley’s funky guy bopping to ‘Hops Scotch’ (by Miles Tilly, Audiosauce), disappearing behind the bride them popping out again.

A megaphone is used to spread propaganda, including asking why a woman bothers to keep looking good when she’s already married with children and therefore doesn’t have to do it – which elicits shocked laughter from the audience. As the dulcet tones of Ian Fraser introduce Mr Penis Augmentation, Miss Cheek Implant, Miss Vaginaplasty et al, the dancers merely progress from walking to running.

A super-lively sequence, to Patsy Riggir’s ‘Beautiful Lady’, has Hunziker adorned with balloon boobs and pursued by a black-suited Andrew Rusk. Not so much slapstick as slap everything, the point seems to be that true closeness only becomes possible, at last, when the boobs burst.

Later – to Pitch Black’s ‘Electric Earth’, I think – the same two play out a drunken, orgiastic non-relationship with her screaming for more and him, finally, walking away. (Apparently this is based on actual observations of binge-drinking teenagers in Courtenay Place).

Howard Morrison’s rendition of ‘How Great Thou Art’ gets an ironical twist as Knox is plied with pink lamingtons. Assuming the idea is to satirise peer group pressure, this image doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. (I don’t think her dry retching at the end was supposed to denote bulimia.)

And so the inner beauties reclaim the space in a lyrical sequence involving swooping lifts and sideways rolls through space. Except Stannard, as a catwalk model with lipstick-smeared mouth, is still walking like clockwork and her high-heeled footsteps are the last sounds to be heard.

A traditional rendition of ‘Po Atarau’ (‘Now is the Hour’) has lunched this dance which is otherwise book-ended by Conrad Wedde’s ‘Twilight’, recorded by Phoenix Foundation. Malvia-Major sings Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ and the impressive variety of homegrown music also includes ‘Haunted Takes’ (Sola Rosa), ‘How You Doing’ (The Front Lawn), ‘I’m in the Mood for Dancing’ (Finden Myers-Puzey) and ‘I Wonder’ (Gareth Farr).

Once or twice, especially during In Time of Flight, I felt some dancers were just working at remembering their moves, which is not surprising given their work-load and the weeks that elapse between each one-off performance. But when they engage with an idea that makes their work a means to some greater end – as they do most often in Here Lies within – they really take off to a whole new level of excellence.

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