New Dance Group is a dance-performance created by Josie Archer and Kosta Bogoievski, and presented by Footnote’s ChoreoCo as part of the New Zealand Fringe Festival. Archer and Bogoievski, two experimental dance makers who work throughout Europe, the US, and Aotearoa, have made a show which pokes fun at everything…. it’s a dance that feels like a two-day old fish, and watching it is like stepping, joyfully, on bubble wrap.

Throughout New Dance Group, Archer and Bogoievski cheekily confuse, pickpocket, and gaslight ‘choreography’ and ‘performance’. What comes of their efforts is a rigorous and delicate dance/joke. New Dance Group understands the energetic promise of awkwardness, and teases out a beautifully gawky consideration of dance that feels like being tickled in slow-motion. Underwater.

Jill Johnston says, “the solution to the problem of identity is, get lost.” (1)

Choreographic synesthesia abounds. When Vito Prasasta Adipurwanto finishes a wonderfully unsure dance by exiting through the theatre entrance and leaving it open, I can taste the noise coming from the Circa Theatre lobby.  Later, when the performers use their bodies to ‘sound’ — vibrating their vocal chords like leaden instruments – their voices prick my skin, like a choreographic vaccination.

The dance is inquisitive and obsessive. Gestures become slides at a playground, ridden again and again with a compulsion heedless of reason or enjoyment. I remember heads thrown up and down with a terrific disregard for grace, a violently rhythmical kicking of your own shins, and pursed lips blowing on arch fingernails.
All five performers in New Dance Group (Tiana Lung, Angus Syben, Katrina Bastian, Brittany Kohler, and Vito Prasasta Adipurwanto) are exceptional.

I am held rapt by Vito Prasasta Adipurwanto, whose ability to bypass demonstrative performativity is remarkable and beautiful. He follows Simone Forti’s injunction to ‘Perform THAT!’ (indicating a discarded coat), and shows us that to take pleasure in what you do can be revelatory. Adipurwanto is marvelously at peace with the situation — he is virtuosity at its best.

Katrina Bastian is very funny. In the “Gravity Ceremony”, her performance makes crudeness a lecherous pastime. Suspended by the tips of her zealously stretched fingers, she stumbles forward on toe-tip, belting the lyrics of John Mayer’s ‘Gravity’. It’s Pina Bausch on Tiktok. She adopts quixotism to make fun of it; moaning on perfect pitch as she descends into a push-up with sunny, blithe masochism. I cackled.

Tony Black’s lights are wonderfully gauche. In one frenzied section, they flash brightly coloured with all the tact of an inebriated music festival, adopting idiocy as an aesthetic strategy to beautiful result. Black, who becomes a performer halfway through, dances with engrossing candor and precarity.

I feel perverted writing about New Dance Group. I don’t want to reify a show so erotic in its refusal of coherence, grace, the possibility of an answer or endpoint. Archer, Bogoievski, and the members of the New Dance Group make the air in the theatre marvelously gauche and polluted. It is delicious and funny. Go!

1 Johnston, Jill. Marmalade Me. University Press of New England, 1998.

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