Women & Honour: Notes on Lying is an hour long dance piece developed from a well received shorter work previewed in 2006. Choreographer Claire Luiten leads but she calls it a creative collaboration between herself and composer Charlotte Rose, lighting designer Sean Curham, and dancers Kerryn McMurdo, Tallulah Holly-Massey and Matt Gibbons. It is presented on the floor in the concert chamber of the Auckland Town Hall with audience on three sides provoking a sense of intimacy: this is a sympathetic space for dance and fruitful teamwork realises Luiten’s vision; the various elements of the production are well balanced.

A voiceover not quite up to par in terms of articulation begins the aural scape as exquisite images of a naked Luiten flash large on white screen before the ‘real’ Luiten scoots on her back across the space in the merest glimmer of light. There is a sense of expectation as the audience leans forward to catch prone figures partially obscured from sight lines.

Suspended par can lights – one of many novel devices from Curham – illuminate a figure in red on the floor as text, image and movement collide/merge and the questions of closeness, emotion and the truth of the body are placed. Ground based Luiten finally rises, butohesque, with skin and muscle gorgeously lit, only to sink earthwards once again in a breathtakingly sumptuous hinge exhibiting supreme control in her body. This athlete is in great shape.

The repeated motif of a woman sailing across the cyclorama suspended on a crawling man’s back is potent and serves to introduce one of the central themes of the work; the power struggles and lies between individuals.

Contact improvisation lifts and contained gentle phrases inform movement that tends to inhabit a middle ground. The vocabulary doesn’t explore the full potential between extension, tension and release. A lot of ground based work slows the pace and tempo of the work: attention to the overall rhythm would be beneficial.

A sympathetic duet between Holly-Massey and McMurdo leads to a bumping weaving quartet. The man does the lifting, sensuously guiding a woman onto his shoulders and there is a sense that people are alienated from each other, not making a truthful connection.

Sometimes a break into natural pedestrian movement draws my attention to the small moments between ‘choreography’, as if the dancer’s body unadorned by garlands of movement suddenly becomes more real, more truthful – not wearing the lie of ‘performance’.

A twitching solo from Luiten doesn’t reach the exhilarating heights of her movement from the earlier prototype. She has a kind of emotional fit, is restrained and is then rescued by Gibbons; glued back together and tenderly manipulated in her poignant rag doll listlessness. This female character is vulnerable but the man is tender as they exit, her clinging to him koala/childlike to finish this lovely duet.

The two other women snake through a duet on a long diagonal. They are Pania like, gorgeous contracting, expanding and swivelling mermaids who then slither gecko like between us.

Matthew Gibbons has a solo. From a prone defenceless position he rises but begins falling out of control to then break the relationship with the audience and request some bodies’ chair: this is a shock but wakes us out of the torpor that the previous slow rhythm has created. He does tricks with the chair, shows off and sings himself into a conventional character while a soon to be car/woman – a 1957 good model – sidles, in red slip, along a wall and into the space. Kerryn McMurdo plays the scene well. This is humorous and draws chuckles. Luiten’s instincts have rightly let her know that the work does need more textures to hold interest but I am not sure that this it the tone required or perhaps she needed to dig deeper than the cliché to find a more striking, disturbing and appropriate image/scene of female objectification.

A petticoat dance offers light relief and another mode of femaleness but this interpolation seems at odds with the core logic of the work. The stillness of silhouettes on projected flocks of birds afterwards however is spot on.

Luiten could afford to delve more fully into the ideas exposed in this section – the process has only just begun and requires more time for exploration.

In the final section the choreographer emerges scantily clad and paints a ritual black strip across herself, then twirls, dervishly, artfully around the space. A beautifully mesmeric image that is truthful – there are no lies here.

hroughout composer Charlotte Rose conjures a sparsely appropriate soundtrack that is sensitive to the ebb and flow of the dynamic onstage. A very pleasing moment occurs when the voices of children playing, accompanies a movement sequence where the dancers support and lift each other. This sound and movement together lighten the spirit; for a breath or two there is the possibility of real functioning truths between humans before the image dissolves away leaving male and female trying to stand in unison but constantly being pulled down as the other two female dancers leave, one dragging the other off into the murk. Does truth/hope not stand a chance against gravity or inertia?

Tallulah Holly-Massey, Kerry McMurdo and Gibbons give deeply focused performances and their strengths as fine dancers are well utilized but I felt yearning to see Luiten’s physical commitment and considerable prowess matched. It takes time to really draw dancers into a particular vocabulary and physicality and I hope this talented group of people continue to work on these ideas.

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