An appreciative audience saw Footnote’s Made in New Zealand programme end its national tour in Wellington.

In Somebody’s Darling, reflection is shared as a man progressively sheds his clothing. Albeit a solo, the dance implies relationships – of body and thought, movement and song, self and other, composer and poet, choreographer and dancer. Francis Christeller gives an assured performance, although his live song met with some challenge in this venue. 

In Stealth, a powerful presence is established through motifs of body, strength, paint, energy, canvas, tattoo, identity. This dance is wonderfully cast on Jeremy Poi, and he brings real mana to it. A number of works by Footnote have found success in art galleries, and Stealth harnesses dance to visual art in an unusually interesting way.  

I Changed had a curious exploration of dancers offering glimpses into the daily reality of bodies in the studio and the dressing rooms. It did not quite settle to its comfort zone, as themes of distraction and frustration chased each other through the work.

But it was in Purlieu that the evening’s triumph lay. From the first assured square of light, one dancer, then soon an expanded cast, transformed the stage into both the microcosm and macrocosm of city life. In tight and faultless sequencing of movement, sets of blocks were danced on and carried cross the stage suggesting by turns a platform, a perch, a building, a cityscape, demolition, restoration, habitat for humanity, and for bird life.

The stunning design of costume and lighting, and wonderfully driving music, gave real coherence to the theme, and the company transformed itself. This is Footnote’s most mature and striking work to date, with new recruits merging into a strong team. Purlieu will do them and the country proud in Shanghai in July.
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In these times of increasing global conformity, when they are even threatening to take the “Kiwi” out of KiwiBank who can you count on to wave the flag for Godzone? Footnote Dance would have to be one of the front-runners, with their proud proclamation of Made in New Zealand works and a superb poster featuring the North and South Islands composed entirely of bodies in motion.

Historically, Footnote’s culture, under the long-standing direction of Deirdre Tarrant, has been solely focussed on developing New Zealand choreographers and using New Zealand music when creating repertoire. So it is entirely fitting that this fine young Company will be representing our country at Expo 2010 in Shanghai with a superb new choreography by Malia Johnston, intriguingly entitled, Purlieu.

This work is a polished gem – the atmosphere that it creates is highly charged, establishing defined but constantly shifting locations that are texturally enhanced by diagonally placed squares of light, solid wooden boxes and flowing swathes of material. The bodies of the dancers weave themselves through this design in unison groupings of continuous movement that play with levels, direction and tempi aided by the evocative music of Eden Mulholland.

Notions of balance are explored, as the three women rise and fall while perched on the tiny boxes facing the back of the stage – so that their backs become eloquent conveyers of a strange emotive language, utilising a staccato vocabulary of hand movements, in close proximity to their bodies. The dancers’ long draping skirts anchor them to the ground so that they appear like sentinels, elongated in form and gazing out into the distance.

Partnering lifts allow the women to soar, touching down briefly on the boxes only to rise up again in a different direction, their bodies wrapping around their partners, while folding and unfolding in multiple variations. The final image sees the boxes reconfigured into a tiny city, gradually fading in the light.

The other new work, I Changed choreographed by Sarah Foster, shows the Company in an entirely different mode – combative and competitive, while investigating the dynamics of social interchange and group ethos. One man (Robbie Curtis) is excluded from the ‘in crowd’, by various modes of rejection, sometimes flippantly, but mostly in a manner that is deliberately intimidating.

The dancers who all contributed to this choreography, quickly establish a pack mentality with a great deal of humour that nevertheless masks a restless and adversarial attitude, with everyone trying to outdo each other in acts that feature inappropriate touching, showing off and aggression. Very few connections are made within the group and when they occur they are only fleeting.

This society is not one to conform to convention, but instead puts a brave face on what appears to be inner turmoil. It is hard not to view it as a metaphor or commentary on the world in its present state of informational overload.

Curtis, after his final exclusion, dances a strong solo of acrobatic balances and flips that seems to celebrate his individuality while Sarah Knox appears to have ongoing internal dialogues with herself, in her two beautifully judged solos. Anita Hunziker’s untamed effervescence comes to the fore, as she presents as ‘one of the boys’ in many of the groupings.

Jeremy Poi, a dancer of strong presence, has often been used as an instigator of humour in Footnote works – a role that he plays to the hilt and seems to relish. In Stealth, however, choreographed by Ross McCormack, he appears in a different light – connected to his inner self and enacting a tumultuous dialogue in a vocabulary of controlled dissonance.

This is an excellent work that aims to represent hip-hop graffiti – itself a visual manifestation of rapping – into a highly original and visceral dance-form, where the body literally becomes the canvas for expression.

Michael Parmenter’s minimalist work, Somebody’s Darling, is strongly performed by Francis Christeller, but nevertheless appears strangely austere and bleak in its intent. The deliberate, ritualistic nature of the choreography speaks of a return to the themes of repression and denial, addressed by Parmenter earlier in The Dark Forest and Les Noces. Christeller is not afraid to plumb these depths, however, and takes on the challenge of singing Alistair Campbell’s poetry, set to music by Douglas Lilburn.

The Company, fresh from a South Island and Auckland tour, is in tight performance mode. The two newcomers, Lucy Marinkovich and Robbie Curtis, together with guest dancer Yanhao Du contribute to a physically robust ensemble that will represent New Zealand strongly in Shanghai.
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Four very different works conclude sterling season by this company 

In the first moments of Purlieu, Malia Johnston’s new work opening this programme and soon bound for exhibition at the World Expo in Shanghai, small and precious performance spaces are first defined by light, as one neat little square, then two, three, four.

Four male dancers variously inhabiting these illuminated pens push against their boundaries with athletically expansive movements, while three female figures, hunched and draped and shadowy, quietly set the stage with small black boxes.

Expo’s theme is "better cities – better living" and the boxes momentarily suggest a city skyline before the three women step up and elegantly release their wrappings to appear as elongated goddesses, backs to the audience, in evening dress. [More]
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The work has a bit more content to be considered a ‘short’ work, yet feels perhaps it could become a full-length piece. It is great for Auckland supporters to see this glimpse of Johnston’s offering to New Zealand Day at the World Expo 2010, Shanghai in July.

I Changed (Sarah Foster) has three women [Anita Hunziker, Sarah Knox, Lucy Marinkovich] with T-shirts over their heads. Fun ponytails and quick little walks, smiling, giggling and shifting, they are joined by two men [Jeremy Poi, Francis Christeller] who challenge them to duels of playground banter, sexist mockery (“You dick”/ “Weiner”/ “Hey Fishlips”/ “Smelly-bum”). This is emphasised by episodes of lightning fast movement, lifting, jumping and spinning in displays of overt and subliminal sexual bravado.

The music changes and ‘the other guy’ (Robbie Curtis) walks on and attempts to touch Christeller’s privates while the girls pick wedgies out of their backsides. Knox plays with perfect technique and contrasts this with fun trashiness to create a playful atmosphere. The guys do a repetitive alternating sequence of lying on top of each other intimately then throwing the other off, as Poi and Hunziker reappear (in op shop jerseys and socks) to mooch in the background as if dancing lackadaisically in a private lounge.

There is a beautiful solo by Sarah Knox that is all legs, arms and cute little gestures that show her ‘marking’ ballet movements (hands beating her wrist to imitate the feet). We see Foster’s penchant for exaggerating the beautiful into extremities of deformity or ugliness that makes for an interesting choreographic comment about femininity and expectations.

Angry screamers jump in singlets and shorts, in a sequence of fighting, grunts and wrestling holds and throws. This unique vocabulary shifts around the space in different formations. The performers are machines, well trained and committed to their dancing, their bodies strong as they attack the space again and again.

There is so much movement in this piece with the vocabulary constantly changing and creatively explorative.

Seeing all the girls in their bras and undies, I realise the choreographers are mostly women in this programme (with the exception of Ross McCormack). It makes me ponder what this thread of female angst might be about and how it could be reflective of the state of the NZ women’s psyche (if ‘Made in New Zealand’ could be considered a portrayal of some type of deeper national subconscious).

Stealth (Ross McCormack) is a solo with Jeremy Poi that starts with him pushing a canvas across the stage. With downbeat electronica by Jody Lloyd, it makes me think this piece would be better suited to an ‘underground’ club or gallery where the audience could feel less restrained and more interactive. Smudging blue paint on the wall and making outlines of his arms (we notice someone else manipulates the canvas) as his hypnotic hands spin and blur.

Themes of isolation and sparks of creativity are seen in postures of hunching, protection, retreating and challenge. Whether a statement of intent, perhaps this work reflects the faraway-ness of the choreographer living, working and surviving in Europe and maybe the burdens of being a New Zealand artist.

The work also showcases the dancer’s journey: as Poi demonstrates his intense commitment and dominating physicality we see insights of his performative growth and maturing development as an artist over the past few years of national touring (with Footnote and other productions).

Poi is cast as an angry, intense man at times throughout the show; he pulls his pants down and screams, which seem to be a recurring theme – echoed also in Foster’s and O’Neil’s work. This stripping down, exposing, taking control of vulnerability, starts to form threads that tug away at the thought of what makes our society and generation tick, questioning where we are at individually, collectively and nationally. 

Mytland (Claire O’Neil)

Preppy guy (Jeremy Poi) comes in falling and twirling; Geek Guy (Francis Christeller) enters with glasses and corduroy pants, followed by Sporty Chick (Anita Hunziker) in tracksuit and cargo pants. Next come Arty Girl (Lucy Marinkovich) with her black vest and open gaze and Sleepy Guy (Jesse Wikiriwhi) in his green pyjamas as if he has just woken up.

“I’m the real one,” says Wikiriwhi, before he jumps, backbends and turns. Desperate Housewife (Knox) falls across the stage as if she is on a slope. Marinkovich tells her story while Wikiriwhi talks over her. “I’m the most beautiful person in the world,” announces the Geek to the back cyc. They echo Wikiriwhi’s solo, falling and rocking under blue lights to the sound of slow screeches.

The group against the individual narrative is again used as a device, similar to Foster’s work. Thunder, throat singing and clashy sounds make them move like they are doing a contemporary Krump. Knox’s verbal diatribe is made up of commonly heard sayings and proverbs: “When the shit hits the fan, bite the bullet and wing it.”

Strange toings and froings. Wikiriwhi states, “No choir, or church or philosophy” – while behind him Hunziker moans, grunts, sobs and flops. She continues her little internal temper tantrum /tirade struggling like a grumpy little girl. Everyone comes onstage to soothe her, till she realises this and starts to play on the tribe’s good intentions.

The next section makes the viewer wonder how the dancers, as fit and agile and adaptable as they are, are able to cope with the demands of such an energetically hard-core programme.

“Seasons come and go,” they each sing, speak, screech out of tune. Christeller lets loose and tells every one of all the devices of mass destruction he has on him and for everyone to “get back”. His desperation, hostility and vulnerability show the mixed messages inherent within the work and the juxtaposition of self to community, to country, allegiance and coping mechanisms.

“That’s fantastic honey,” says Marinkovich absentmindedly to the Geek, as they stand eating chocolates by a backstage microphone. Poi decides he has had enough of the others onstage and tries to remove them one by one. When he turns on the audience and swears at them, he internalises his rage and climbs atop a ladder to wait it out.

The final dance shows a recapitulation of various moments of the piece, with dancers exchanging roles and ideas in an assemblage of ideas that continue to hack away at the core of the work.

The evenings programme seems to almost wash into one piece (with the exception of Johnston’s). My final questions leave me to ponder: Were the choreographers influenced by the same themes, concepts or concerns? Do their viewpoints portray a New Zealand society and generation in turmoil? Is there a distinct Euro dance-theatre sensibility present and what is it representative of? Do the dancers’ interpretations draw this essence of rawness, troubled internal /external realities into a distilled whole themselves?

[Reviews of the NZ International Arts Festival season of MTYLAND may be found here.] 
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Readers of TheatreView have at times challenged the suggestion that the 22 year old Wellington-based dance company, Footnote, truly represents New Zealand identity in its productions (see here).

Without wishing to stir the coals of a dead fire, it is clear from the Made in New Zealand programs that director Deirdre Tarrant takes an ecumenical approach, situating the identity of the company itself at the nexus of modern international dance practice—notably Expressionism and hip-hop—and the particularities of those who dwell in Aotearoa.

Cultural and racial difference is not a principal focus of performance (as is the case with Black Grace). Rather, the diversity of membership, stylistic devices, and musical references provides the main way in which the company engages with anything which might be considered to be specifically national or bicultural.

The music of New Zealand’s most famous post-classical orchestral composer, Douglas Lilburn, features, as does the deep electronic bass thuds of NZ old skool hip-hopper Jody Lloyd (of Darktower), as well as interesting mixed collages by Eden Mulholland (crossing from neo-Romantic strings, to Minimalism, to glitch, and other materials) and Andrew Foster.

Together with the New Zealand Ballet, Footnote is one of the few companies to regularly tour the South Island, in this instance going as far as Invercargill. Footnote thereby promotes both NZ dance and music, although it is a great shame that live musicians were only ever present for one of the four pieces—choreographer Claire O’Neil’s ‘MTYLAND’, performed to music by Herman Martin of the avant-hop / electro-rock-crossover band, Battles—and this piece was not even offered to Dunedin audiences, despite the wealth of local brass players who could have been co-opted to play along with Martin’s samples.

Dunedin was however treated to choreography from Michael Parmenter, Ross McCormack, Sarah Foster and Malia Johnston.

It is not, in fact, all that expensive to pay for one multi-instrumentalist with a laptop to join the tour, and one hopes Tarrant and her colleagues might consider such an option in the future. This somewhat ambivalent profiling of the music is also sadly reflected in the program offered to audiences, in which no details of the considerable experience of the musical artists co-opted for Made in New Zealand are provided alongside the lengthy biographies of each choreographer and each dancer (complete with color photos!). It would be nice if Footnote more explicitly acknowledged that music serves as so much more than mere accompaniment to dance, and that it too has live properties, even in its contemporary electronic or electro-acoustic forms (pace Lilburn).

Parmenter’s ‘Somebody’s Darling’ began proceedings in Dunedin: a delicate, melancholy solo for the light, long-limbed dancer Francis Christeller (although unfortunately the sound was run so high that Lilburn’s otherwise elusive music often distorted through the PA). Lilburn’s ‘Elegy’ provides a sparse, slowly climbing neo-Romantic piano setting for the poetry of Alistair Te Airiki Campbell. Together with the device of having Christeller appear in a full dress suit, and carefully undress and then re-dress in stages between the stanzas, this provides the main dramaturgical structure of the work.

Like much NZ dance, Parmenter’s movement is built from a broadly Expressionistic palette, derived in large part from mid-20th century American dance (Martha Graham and the Denishawn). Expansion through the chest, and the rise and fall of bodily tensions with breath, or the major arching of the body along the full length of the spine, energizes much of the action. Parmenter also produces a restrained lyricism, with Christeller’s arms curving about him to create a complex set of interweaving arcs before caressing himself about the waist, or unfolding fingers into and out of each other in exquisite detailing of the hands.

In a particularly striking section, Christeller coils near-naked on the floor in a state approaching ecstasy, whilst also maintaining a vulnerability and tenderness in poise.

In short, ‘Somebody’s Darling’ is an exemplum of the particular formal properties and stylistic approaches Parmenter draws upon. Nor is the work entirely familiar. At the beginning, and then once more toward the conclusion, Christeller stops dancing and mimes singing the words (in this case, actually provided on CD by NZ baritone Paul Whelan, who is at least credited in the program notes). Christeller and Parmenter again handle this delicately, avoiding the potential for comedy, and instead producing a curious see-sawing between intimate affectivity and an almost Brechtian sense of distance from the emotions and text being referred to. Whilst I would have liked these more unusual elements drawn out more, ‘Somebody’s Darling’ more than succeeds on its own merits.

Rather more innovative, at least in terms of form, is McCormack’s ‘Stealth’, another solo, this time performed by Jeremy Poi. The dancer enters, crawling, his head obscured by a canvas which he pushes with his shoulder. Featuring a splash of paint carelessly strewn across its surface, this site of artistry serves at once as an urban space, a wall or a train on which graffiti might emerge, but also as a body, an extension of Poi’s own form.

Hip-hop has, by and large, been about the forcible reclamation and re-colonisation of urban space; a vociferous, electronic, vocal and painterly statement that its authors were and are here, in the midst of urban decay and scattered about the periphery of the cities. 20th century painting has itself often been theorised as a search for the final, irreducible trace of the painter or the author in the form of the gesture, the brushstroke, or the body. Jackson Pollock’s canvases are as much planes across which we register where his arm has travelled, and how his own bodily stature structured these drips and blobs, as they are more overtly formalistic or arranged works.

‘Stealth’ operates according to a similar logic. Poi’s movement takes the high acrobaticism of much break-dancing and renders it even more fluid, smooth, effortless and liquid in its execution than it is when performed on cardboard at a street corner. Whilst rhythmically simple, both in the movement and in the music — Lloyd’s relentlessly abstracted thuds themselves sound like some kind of abstraction and distillation of hip-hop itself into some kind of near irreducible and profoundly bassy essence — the choreography nevertheless often takes on a complexity and immediacy that makes one wonder if portions are improvised according to beat-based structures.

In either case, McCormack’s main achievement is to strip back hip-hop into a highly readable physical vocabulary, which then provides a platform for thematic exploration. Poi’s own focus as a dancer is at times startling, imparting a warrior-like militancy and forcefulness to the dense throws of weight and effort he negotiates. 

Poi daubs his hands in blue, inscribes the canvas with some of this, before engaging in a set of multi-direction hand curls and inter-weavings, even more complex than those of Parmenter’s earlier work. He then lowers his sweat pants to cover his already brown thighs with black paint.

A more eloquent statement of the complexities of hip-hop’s politics would be difficult to imagine. Widely adopted by former colonial peoples and diasporic classes, hip-hop emerged out of social marginalisation and oppression. It took these forces and inverted them, effectively painting ‘the black’ black again. Poi inscribes curlicues and zigzags into the oily texture across his thighs, their forms echoing his own impressive upper-body tatau, in a serious of gestures somewhere between lyric artistry and scarification. The piece ends with Poi vigorously and repetitively rubbing this material across his thighs in a manner which, like hip-hop, seems to reclaim pain and ambivalence back into social power and self-identification.

Foster’s ‘I Changed’ is the first ensemble work in the program. Foster appears to be aiming at the careening, highly abstract, and often deliberately disjointed dramatic ambience of much contemporary European dance-theatre since Pina Bausch (Ballets C. de la B., Need Company, Didier Théron, etc), moving from mime, snatches of spoken words, game-play, play with props and costumes (extended passages involve the re-arrangement of stretchable clothing into various unlikely configurations), and so on.

The emotional and dramatic content revolves around the desire for social acceptance, and at times the work feels like the TV series Skins transposed into dance. A particularly strong section involves Poi beating and being beaten up, moving between fierce self-control and restraint, to being lost in anguish. Another impressive solo is danced to music crafted by Foster from samples of baby noises.

Overall though, the piece has a studio feel, and the larger dramaturgy — abstract though it may be — has not been fully worked out. The reason one moves from one section to another is rarely clear, and the movement is neither sufficiently cacophonous for a total dissolution of structure to be effected, nor are there enough repeated motifs or phrases to create an effective through line. 

One suspects however the piece would not read like this if a well put-together lighting design helped move one from foci to foci. But unfortunately whomever designed the lighting rig (I can find no credit in the program or on the website) has opted to blow out the space most of the time with blue tinged floodlights. The dancers and the choreography therefore battle to provide an adequate context for the actions one sees on stage. 

Ensemble work is far better managed (though still not always as well lit as one would hope) in Johnston’s ‘Purlieu’. The piece owes much to Jíøí Kylián’s ‘Bella Figura’, opening with a tableau presenting the backs of the three female dancers (Anita Hunziker, Sarah Knox and Lucy Marinkovich) sculpturally spot-lit from above, shoulders crisply framed by the lines of their semi-translucent black dresses (strongly indebted to Joke Visser’s designs for ‘Bella Figura’, which has since become an all but ubiquitous styling in contemporary ballet).

The movement begins as measured, at times bent, extended, or using acute angles, but tending overall towards the lyrical. Nevertheless, if Kylián’s company, NDT, provides a reference point for this work, Johnston’s choreography should be described as NDT with the cracks showing. There is an urgency and teetering roughness to the movement, which Kylián himself eschews. 

Similarly, it soon becomes clear that the small black boxes upon which our trio stand are to act as important, mobile sculptural and choreographic elements within the work. Dancers carry on and carry off cubes in a complex interplay of construction and deconstruction. In one particularly striking moment, the male dancers gently bear the women through space as the latter attempt to soar from one box to another.

The careful poising between transcendence and failure, precise action and chaos, runs throughout these and other actions such that the sense of effortless perfection typically alluded to in ballet proper is deliberately vexed and shown to be part of a far less perfect but no less beautiful process of striving and of reaching the edge of one’s limits.

Mulholland’s music matches and brings out these qualities, moving from the initial, gentle string samples, through to a more layered juxtaposition of musical lines, before traditional instrumentation itself is abandoned and the aesthetics of glitch — sounds created when CDs and other digital technologies fail, slip, click and cut — informs the dance. ‘Purlieu’ thereby engages with a serious of extant traditions and practices, whilst infusing them with new meanings and implications.

For this audience member anyway, ‘Purlieu’ and ‘Stealth’ were therefore the most innovative works in the program, with Parmenter’s slightly more conventional piece providing an excellent fillip. Even if Foster’s piece is less successful, this would seem to be more due to its installation than its initial conceptualisation per se.

Touring works is always difficult, and with more attention to providing due care to lighting, sound design and the company’s commissioned musicians, Footnote is sure to continue to profile some of NZ’s finest work for some time to come.
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