Prior to the Canterbury earthquakes of 2011, the Centre of Contemporary Art (COCA) was a regular venue for dance performances, affirming the long-established connection between contemporary dance, avant-garde music and the visual arts.  Following repair, seismic strengthening and refurbishment, COCA has reopened and is once again a venue for fruitful interactions between the arts with these performances of Anchor Point, a collaboration between artist, Robyn Webster and choreographer, Fleur de Their.  The work emerged over a four day period of experimentation within the gallery space, which remained open throughout this period for viewers of COCA’s current show, Contemporary Christchurch, a survey of recent developments in the city’s art.  Visitors to the show could thus observe the evolution of what the makers describe as a ‘tactile exploration of sculpture, dance, sound [and] light.’

De Thier’s works invariably have a strong connection to the environment she works in, whether it is the ‘nor-west winds that are such an inescapable feature of life in Canterbury, or the rupture caused by the earthquakes that have wrecked havoc with the city’s fabric and in the lives of its inhabitants.  Anchor Point continues this exploration of a contemporary world in which the certainty of fixed points has disappeared and everything seems in a state of flux.  In Christchurch this universal contemporary condition is especially acute, with the almost total remaking of the city a part of everyday experience.

The performance starts in the gallery foyer as the dancers enter the building before climbing the stairs to the main gallery space but their ascent is fraught, backs pushing against the stair walls as if the opposing planes threaten to close in on them.  Liberated from the potentially crushing space of the stairwell, the dancers interact with sculptural elements that lie on the gallery floor or hang from the roof, an assemblage of nets, vertical blinds, bundles of magnetic tape and treaded 35 mm slides.  While the audience initially stands the dancers explore the spatial possibilities of an extended loop of harakeke stems loosely jointed together; it is a boundary to be pushed, a lattice to frame space, a web to imprison.  The flax stems are light but rigid, apparently strong but also fragile, a product of the swamps that once covered a city that has lost its anchors.

In this production the anchors are both metaphorical and also real; they are the weights that act as counterbalances for the suspended nets that subdivide the performance space but they are also light enough to be moved as the space is gradually opened up to allow for freer movement.  They also provide the suspension point for the harakeke bundle that has now played its part.  But these anchors are also ambiguous; they are made from clear plastic bags filled with water (remember that one litre of water weighs one kilogram).  Unlike the solidity of a waka’s traditional anchor stone these anchors are fragile, fluid and easily dissipated.

The performers’ interactions with the hanging fronds and the shafts of blue, green and white light that illuminate the space evoke the subaqueous world where anchors perform their usual role, but this is a world in which memory both floats and ensnares.  In one of the most disquieting moments of the whole performance, a dancer disgorges a seemingly endless vomit of magnetic tape.  More tape, dragged from the suspended, kelp-like bundles, is used to bind and blindfold a second dancer, who is then enveloped in this shroud of tape.  Like the hanging ribbons of photographic transparencies, magnetic tape captures moments in time; spewed from their ordering containers, these memories have become inchoate. Without fixed shape, they swirl around us, blinding and binding. 

Anchor Points is still a work in progress but it is already richly suggestive and full of possibilities.  At just 40 minutes it has the potential to be expanded into a larger work. The troupe of six dancers drawn from the Hagley Dance Company along with Julia McKerrow and Aleasha Seaward, give assured performances; Jace Northe provides musical backing that incorporates acoustic and electric guitar, keyboard, voice and musique concrete; Sean James is responsible for the evocative lighting. 

The major limitation of COCA as a performance venue for dance is the unforgiving nature of its bare concrete floor; this inevitably limits what dancers can achieve.  A dedicated performance space with a sprung floor and adaptable seating is something that Christchurch desperately needs as an anchor point for the future development of dance in the city.

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