The Prime Cuts choreographic showcase launched the Tempo Dance Festival’s second week in fine style with five new dance works which were a delight to experience, presented by some of our most accomplished performers.

Former New Zealand Ballet soloist Geordan Wilcox danced smoothly to the music of Sinead O’Connor’s Just Like You Said it Would Be, playing off the lyrics in key moments to give his choreographic debut just a hint of drama. [More]
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A smorgasbord of delightful dance

The making of a meal, Prime Cuts is:

Liana Yew know, like – something beautiful you’d pick up on the west coast… eh.

Kiwi

This dance is an exquisite composition; defined and vigorous and perfectly framed by Rosey Feltham’s costume design.  A pewter pearl on our black floor, announced by flutes, uncurls as if being born of iron sand.  Turning like a shell she is dark, on a dark coast. 

In a colour palette of black laced with accents of red, Yew’s second skin parallels perfectly the elements of defiance that flash from her gestures and facially expressed claim upon our shared language.  Emerging limbs move of and with the earth, outstretched and searching …  A karanga intervenes the slow circle of space; I belong here she says, see me – see – my face. 

The spectrum of dance vocabulary and use of audio-visual projection within this work speaks of femininity and strength; of the natural world as well as a world of intersecting socio-cultural distinctions. 

Kiwi is a beautifully integrated multi-media experience of remembering and embracing both that which is lost of our ancestry and that which is new and renamed.  Conveyed by a skilfully articulate body in collaboration with virtual ghostings of herself, I feel the dancer’s call, her warrior stand.  To this earth, this iron sand where I take my breath, I am Yew.

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Where am I?  Man(u)script,  I am legs!!

Snapdragon

In answer to the question of place comes the body – and it belongs to Benny Ord.  Funky, playful and all plasticity, there is nothing to see except Benny Ord and his legs and his… beautiful black shorts.  Where am I?  I am the bend in your giraffian saxophone, leaping for leaves – that part that goes mwaaaa and then phwaa! 

A dancing doll-man sprung to life, Benny Ord is part Peter Pan and part Wendy – with perhaps just a touch of Tinkerbell… What has Timothy Gordon put in that pixie mix?!!

Snapdragon, as the name would suggest, is a syncopated, snappy and somewhat dragonic jig; an expressionist frolic that has me all at angles.  Abrupt halting at intended odds with exuberant flourishes speaks of a mathematics lodged in sound. 

This work is a bounding translation of acoustic jaunt made manifest in movement; a magical mix of dragon dust and dance…

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Dandelion spot flight

Navigate

Oh, Clare de la Lune… crouching to a metronome, her breath as music; forward she comes.  Witness, an improvised Luiten; lit, like a lamp of differing densities.  Her skin written delicately upon her bones, moving within the pattern of her dress shift traced.  Transgressing, dressing a patterned translation moving, crept upon the skin of her face.  Make that leap – do not stop guessing, about this taut instrument playing… and played upon, she makes us wait.  Her hair speaks of another decade – Kiss(?) me Clare to an imagined violin, swimming through space on a fingering bow.  Plucking against time, she floats on her own; an electric-acoustic-moth movement-bite; Clare Luiten dance vision, a dandelion spot (f)light.  To capture you in my hand, for even half a moment you would turn, taken, as soon by the weight of the wind.

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Enigmatic restraint

Untitled

Delicate, bold, distant as the sky – Geordan Wilcox presents Untitled, an enigmatic battle with the promise of connection.

It is interesting that at the last moment this choreographer discovered, and chose to use, the sung version of Sinead O’Connor’s Just Like You Said It Would Be instead of the instrumental version he had been rehearsing this work to. 

Wilcox’ first solo performance since his departure from the RNZB last year, Untitled is a work of genuine intent.  The choreography presents a portrait in motion of the iconic kiwi male, straining against his own masculinity in the effort to contain, and I mean contain mate, an enormous spirit. 

The late inclusion of lyrics both contrasts and colludes with the mixed motifs of this work, as Wilcox’ sweeping leaps and spins fall, in a circular nature, to constrain an initial promise of loosened intent… "I will walk in the garden, feel religion within, I will learn how to run with the big boys, I will learn how to sink and how to swim." 

A compelling masculine presence, Geordan Wilcox dances between the classical lines of his inheritance and a passionate expression of internal wilderness.  Glancing upon us, shy of connection, curtailing and collapsing his poetic flights of departure upon himself, Untitled presents man alone, leaping against a deafened world, in search of an unnamed heroic horizon

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Bunny, bunny!  Very bunny!!

Lily

In this theatrical production of historical colour, Kilda Northcott and Lyne Pringle, icons within the New Zealand dance community, acknowledge and celebrate the shared dance ancestry of Lily Stevens, an artistically driven dance teacher of their grandmothers’ generation from the Dunedin scene.

To open the performance, laying out her life as a chronology of costumes from her childhood in a sort of a piano cast of clothing along the front of the stage, is Lyne Pringle.  With each garment a symbolic key to the parental love song made manifest by Lyne’s mother Betty, this work scales an intersection of Lyne’s personal history, recorded for posterity in myriad tufts of tulle and satin details, with that of ardent, production-ambitious Lily Stevens, played by Kilda Northcott. 

One of the highlights of the show has to be the image of Kilda as a collapsed Lily, completely transformed by the crown of a tiny tutu – a tragic portrait of theatrical, owl-eyed exhaustion.  Consummately conveyed by the moment when Lyne explains, "I had to wear a singlet and undies under my tutu, but I didn’t care," Lily is a work of beautifully inter-woven narrative and great comedic timing.

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All in all, a smorgasbord of delightful dance that could be said to have collectively challenged my digestive tract, although this was soon assuaged by a glass of champagne and some much appreciated, animated exchange on the mix with my sister-in-law Susan Leonard.  (Thanks Susan)
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