Opening night of the Unitec Dance Showcase is a stirring event filled with metaphorical hope and humility. Paddy Free’s musical composition and the dancers’ voices in Kia Raupapahia (Let it – us be prepared) weave a sharp, stirring tapestry of timing and acoustics, each pulse reverberating with intention and questioning. A voyage metaphor, a timely response to the currents of Hikoi that are embodied here, is deeply resonant. We are drawn in gasping, into a near-mesmerising choreography that pulses with the feeling of setting forth without a clear destination. Kia Raupapahia is a journey navigated not by maps but by instinct and communal resilience.

Choreographer Eddie Elliott appears as a guiding yet humble figure, observed in the vast foyer of Te Pou Theatre, offering a gentle and aware grounding presence. Movements flow from that place of humility, echoing ancestral respect and awareness of the traditions to be embodied and expanded upon. This first work is an organic composition, a sentient network shaped by students endeavour in tertiary education. They are artists in formation, bound together in the uncertainty and urgency of their own creative journeys. Tamsin Russell’s insightful gaze, exacting and encouraging, punctuates the dancers ‘exploration, her guidance feels like a magnet, an equator drawing the dancers through rehearsal’s nuanced thresholds.

The choreography is more than just movement; it is a dialogic act, a collective reflection that dives headlong into the murky waters of colonised trauma and questions of belonging. Bodies spiral and shift, navigating the ever-present weight of historical pain yet resolutely moving forward, seeking meaning within dance’s extraordinary ability to uplift without concealing. The work holds horror in its awareness of lost integrity at governmental levels. Kia Raupapahia as a protest is daring and brave. It is in a forward motion that feels essential, a call not only to memory but to movement as a pathway to our better honour. In geometric configurations of stage lighting by Jo Kilgour and movement gently curated by Abbie Rogers we, as audience, are brought into the shared witness to courage. The work captures the patience and hope required to sail through socio-political doldrums, and presents a communal navigation that, while born of struggle, emerges as an offer of mutual care. 

The second work Reverence choreographed by Sarah Foster-Sproull, crafts another differently coloured poignant journey through intricate movement that interrogates the layered essence of reverence. Marin Marais’ baroque composition, softened by Eden Mulholland’s arrangements, envelops the work in subtle tensions that recall Tous les matins du monde (All the World’s Mornings) and accentuates a delicately sacred atmosphere, admirably fitting for a dance performance.

Through seamlessly evolving patterns of movement, Foster-Sproull creates her space, where each dancer has room to shine, embodying an almost ceremonial expression of awe and respect that runs through every solo. Here, reverence is conveyed not just in gestures, of curtseys and bows familiar to us who lived out adolescence in dance studios, but in the soft landings, controlled pauses, or delicate hoisting into the air. The dancers run through a sense of unity, and awareness, for each other on stage. 

The sophistication of movement stories does not belie her reverent exploration of self and community, mirrored in the dancers’ embodiment of the collective, another sacred voyage. In visceral response to societal loss and to the trauma that lingers within, Reverence also reminds us of dance’s power to create spaces that prevent shame, instead honouring the complexities of shared human experience as potentially gorgeous. A shimmering silken flamboyance is sketched through Rose Philpotts’ costume choices.

Together, the Unitec crew and their collaborators lend direction to a deeply immersive and emotive performance that oscillates between moments of poised certainty, reducing the awful, by being sensitive to the importance of dance telling our stories, and thereby allowing dancers’ awareness to shape powerful activist interactions. Each work resists providing simple answers, instead daring us as watchers to explore ourselves in deeper, ritualistic processes of resilience. Each work demands not only all artistic skills and technique but vulnerability. Kia Raupapahia and Reverence are not then merely a series of steps, nor is this a ‘showcase’. The dances are testament (even as I write this), to our interwoven stories. Our art form is thus deeply anchored in respect, grounded in honouring its traditions, and uplifted by a sense of awe that inspires performers and audiences alike.

Kia kaha Unitec. 

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