Ladyforce Quatre
The Auckland Performing Arts Centre: TAPAC, Auckland
09/10/2008 - 11/10/2008
Production Details
Ladyforce Quatre
Winner ‘Fishnet’ Best of Tempo° 2006
Winner best female dancer Kilda Northcott – Tempo° 06
Winner Best Dance Dunedin Fringe 2006
Very Highly Commended & Stand Out Performer – Maria Dabrowska NZ Fringe 2008
Ladyforce Quatre combines the eclectic choreographic talents of Katie Burton, Maria Dabrowska, Lyne Pringle and Kilda Northcott.
Three diverse dance works, including an excerpt from the hit of Tempo 06 ‘Fishnet’. A physical, theatrical and award winning show! Three diverse dance works, united by extreme physicality and dramatic theatrics.
Katie Burton, Maria Dabrowska and Mariana Rinaldi bring their eclectic choreographic talents from Auckland, Wellington and Argentina together to present the award winning triple bill; Ladyforce Trois, at Tempo° 2008.
Ladyforce Trois is the winner of ‘Best Dance’ at the Dunedin Fringe, ‘Very Highly Commended’ and ‘Stand Out Pefomer’ at the New Zealand Fringe Festival this year.
The Tempo° season runs from the 9 – 11 October at TAPAC Theatre, 10pm.
Katie Burton presents her work ‘Scuttle’ as the opening work of the programme. ‘Scuttle’ creates an intriguing world where dancers scurry through space, responding to elusive light and sound with intricate dance routines.
‘….in this work she (Burton) has really excavated the movement to find the treasure.‘
Lyne Pringle, Theatreview, February 2008.
Maria Dabrowska is well known to dance audiences for creating dramatic dance work. Her work ‘Solo 2’ is "a dance about dancing, because sometimes that’s what I like to do."
‘Dabrowska is an unconventional and totally idiosyncratic dance artist whose dark sensuality tinged with razor-sharp comic wit slips in the places of our psyche and imagination we are usually not allowed to go. Like eating the last chocolate in your parent’s special truffle box, watching her dance is always a naughty but wicked pleasure. Consume at your own peril!’
Jack Gray, DANZ QUARTERLY, No 7 April 2007
Mariana Rinaldi completes the triple bill with her work ‘exilio’. An attentively designed and theatrical work, ‘exilio’ requires the dancers to wear mens underwear and shirts while performing staunch and stroppy dance movement to the music of Joaquin Segade.
‘Have you ever seen a women wear a couple of humans for shoes? Me neither.’
Lyne Pringle, Theatreview, February 2008
The choreographers are joined onstage by dancers Geoff Gilson (Sean Curham, Malia Johnston, Guy Ryan) and Lucy Miles (Back-Lit Productions)). Musicians Sally Nicholas, Josh Tilsley and Joaquin Segade have all composed original music for the show.
With their trade-mark hilarity, Lyne Pringle and Kilda Northcott bring to the Ladyforce an excerpt from their show Fishnet. The work provides a great forum for these two wily women to present their beliefs, challenges and political debate about the many issues around the invisibility of the older woman. There is an infectious tension as they dance their way towards a dynamic, poignant and highly visible finale as the ugly bitch, the sexy crone and everything/ anything in between. Fishnet is a rapturous exploration of the expressive body by two of New Zealand’s celebrated senior contemporary dancers.
Dates: October 9 – 11 2008, 10pm
Venue: TAPAC Theatre, Motions Road, Western Springs
Tickets: Thursday 9 October only – Pay What You Like Night – all audience members can pay what they like! Other nights $22 Adult, $20 DANZ members & groups 8+, $18 student
Booking: Ticketek ph 0800 842 538 www.ticketek.co.nz
Astounding onstage charisma
Review by Cat Gwynne 10th Oct 2008
The curtain is open to reveal a contained box of darkness given by the frame of the stage. We hear sharp glitches of sound, their unsettling tone driving us into an anxious yet abstract dimension. As tension sets in, the darkness leans our curiosity towards a new yet familiar noise.
It is the sound of a body moving, of feet in sneakers squeaking on the floor in short bursts of movement, cleverly disembodied by the absence of light to aptly frame the work Scuttle by choreographer Katie Burton, the first piece in the shared programme Ladyforce Quatre.
Three black-hooded dancers give vigorous execution to this work from Burton, scampering through varying degrees of darkness and light like crabs with neurosis. Duets and solos are composed well, moments of unison and breaking away, chain reaction and canon cleverly rolling in to make me think of a non-human substance cultivating in a petrie dish.
Images of combat are used as anchors through the movement, turning dance into a fight with space. Bodies twitch, sharp breaths are pinched from the air, and time is knocked into chaos until these three bodies, toppled with tire, are left sprawled and ticking on the floor. And then again they are crab-like, shifting limbs and nippers horizontally across the night’s desert.
A sophisticated integration of movement, light and sound has allowed this choreography to inquisitively explore absence and presence, ambiguity, and the dilemma of the body in void. Focus may have been lost slightly just before the descent to the floor, suggesting that the prior section could be culled slightly, but refinement in other areas gives this piece esteem.
The second piece is Maria Dabrowska’s Solo 2 and oh what a joy it is to simply see someone dancing. As I watch Dabrowska, her sophisticated body knowledge again astounding me, I am transformed. And therefore very thankful to this artist.
Dabrowska leads us through a chic journey of feminine parody and quirk, the dishevelled blonde giving a refreshing injection of spunk to a topic often explored by solo dancing women. It is an uncomplicated display of maturity and wit, of passion and craving being hurled through the air with whipping arms only to be brought back to earth through the frame of satire. It is quite simply, pretty choice.
The programme is topped by an excerpted return of Lyne Pringle and Kilda Northcott’s 2006 Fishnet, a comical exploration of the mature feminine dancer, and a critique of the traditional representation of the young feminine ideal. The clacking of heels, the velvety and silky textures of fabrics, vivid make-up and acid-toned European accents create layers of feminine symbols, a matrix of societal inscriptions for Pringle and Northcott to play and inquire inside. Moments of shock at the display of certain body parts are instantaneously chased away by the parody, creating a series of questions in the mind.
Though the lack of aesthetic cohesion could leave an audience member slightly confused (dangling hip bones, cubed projections, a variety of costumes ) the charisma on stage is astounding and you are left witnessing genius that only comes with rich performance experience.
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