Christmas comes early with Neil Ieremia’s Verses and it is wrapped in high spirits, festive jokes, cracking dancing and the complete package of physicality and emotion. Opening with Fat Freddy’s Drop, Mother Mother music video, the sweeping movement palette of Black Grace is graciously enhanced by director Mark Williams’ deft editing. Film and Xmas themed snapshots continue to illuminate the live action with settings that include watching the Boxing Day races, backyard BBQ and family gatherings as backdrop. Together they work well but deserve better sightlines than The Herald Theatre provides.

The dancers – Sean MacDonald, Zoe Visvanathan, Sarah Baron, Joash Fahitua, Otis Herring, Callum Sefo, James Wasmer and Maresa D’Amore-Morrison – are the sparkling stars of the show. Their performances fully commit to the intricate choreography and the sprinkling of trademark jokes with articulate physicality, comic timing and top quality full-on movement; a tight unit. The choreography demands everything in their vast technical range.

Ieremia’s eloquent use of the contemporary dance palette tinged with Samoan rhythm and gestures is at its best in Verses. Canon can be a tedious device sometimes, but not in Verses where the breathtaking intricacy of movement phrasing and variety of canons bring visual fireworks on this evening of Guy Fawkes (nearly Xmas). Nowhere is this more on show than in an inspired rendition of Roy Orbison’s Crying. Choreographing an iconic piece of music and succeeding is no mean feat. The accomplished musicality and ability to fully exploit percussive punctuation using the sound of the set (a steel table) with lightning fast arm gestures interprets the lyrics with ribbons of irony.

Failed romance and simple story telling are also emblematic of Ieremia’s work and there is plenty to amuse in the Christmas Eve parties of Verses. Subtle glances, hopeless courtships, an ‘excuse me’ interchange telling the story of everyday human bemusement, clowning around in smoochy dancing all add up to a comic handbook of advice on how not to advance your romantic aspirations. If only the dancers had listened to the lyrics of Take Your Time (Al Green). Oh and yes, Verses’ play list is suitably old school.

Ieremia’s ability to continually and fluidly shift the mood in his full-length works is also on show in Verses. As he moves us into Christmas Day we become suitably reflective and spiritual about lost loved ones who are ghosts of Christmas past. Live singing of Samoan hymn Farewell provides heartfelt and solemn dignity.

What would be Christmas without children though? Regeneration becomes a photo album of memorable childhood milestones, probably the dancers’ own, flicking across the screen as the dancers mark time with elaborate patterns of running interrupted by posing for their own snapshots.

Ieremia puts in a digital appearance as a shadow play dancer and this works well as a silvery segue, one of the many in the show, into a blistering finale. An assemblage of small groups, recapturing the start of the show, squeezes out the last drop of energy from the dancers’ seemingly deep reserves. Everything, as they say, is left on the ‘field’. It is indeed ‘fin’. Well almost… but go and see the show for the real end and glimpses into the bigger picture of Black Grace’s world.

The audience are enthusiastic recipients of this youthful and yet eruditeChristmas present, and Verses reminds us why Ieremia has long been at the forefront of New Zealand contemporary dance both at home and overseas. Thanks and Manuia le Kiris Black Grace!

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Talofa!

Neil Ieremia has succeeded yet again in producing a high quality and thought-provoking dance work that sparkles with freshness, exuberance and wit. As in previous works, this is a very clever blending of Ieremia’s cultural roots as a Samoan New Zealander, his engagement in Western-style contemporary dance, his sense of humour, and his interest in the everyday lives of the people around him.  Embodying this blending, at the beginning of the evening, Ieremia walks on to the stage, greets the audience in Maori, Samoan and English and, with humour and an engaging smile, introduces the work and the company, and invites us, the audience, to feel free to laugh or cry. 

In the programme, Ieremia states: 
Xmas Verses is inspired by memories of long hot kiwi summers with family, friends, plenty of food and festivities… In creating the show, I wanted to recapture a spirit of ease and enjoyment in the process…

As a result, we are treated to a programme of projected moving and still images, humour, and high energy, high impact, high velocity dance. The first section is a video of the work Mother Mother  (Music: Fat Freddy’s Drop), hugely energetic and fast with gaspingly high lifts and throws of dancers; this piece is then presented live as the danced finale. The rhythms are often toe-tappingly enjoyable. The dance is extreme in energy and accuracy. The audience’s response turns from giggling to outright laughter, particularly during the antics of boys who have had too much to drink, and the girls who try to manage them.  All sections of the work are enhanced by back-dropped visuals featuring cleverly designed images of the company, and holiday and backyard scenes. These visuals, of course, add to the humour, atmosphere and general entertainment of the work. However, Xmas Verses is not only about the summer holiday fun of friends, family and food. There are solemn moments of reverence and respect. The dancers pause in close formation as dates and photographs of loved ones who have passed in 2014 sweep onto the screen, one of the men sings a Samoan lament, and I grieve with those who feel their loss. We see images of a church in Samoa, family snapshots and, following the onstage action, shots of the company on their recent tour to New York, Edinburgh and South Korea.

Yet, I sense that this is all about family, whanau, those we view as family, whether or not they are blood relatives. Family: those who play together, pray together and grieve together. I hear the group of Samoan people in the audience talking – I imagine they might be deciding which church is pictured and where it is situated. All the while, the dancers portray prayer, reverence, togetherness and community to a hymn sung by Lumana’i O Le Pasefika Community Choir. I am reminded that church services are often a key part of family Christmas gatherings.  

Audience comments at the end include “That was terrific!” and “I’m exhausted!” Perhaps our emotional responses to the humour and grief portrayed have heightened our engagement in the extremes of breath-taking speed, height, risk and outright fun of the dancers; hence the exhaustion. Yet, I sense that there is also a mood of heightened, joyful animation, and deep satisfaction.

I reflect on Xmas Verses; how does it effect me? I enjoy and am exhilarated by the video of Mother Mother and the visual explosion of high velocity, high energy and high-risk dance of this same piece as a live finale. I also enjoy the clever portrayal of the backyard antics of partying: fun, laughter, interactions, competitiveness, drunkenness, dancing, a backyard urinal, a new rebounder, the sounds of popular songs, and the backdrop images. Yet, I also appreciate the well-judged changes of pace. I value being taken through quieter moments of reverence, grief and farewell, and family memories.  Having said that, I enjoyed all sections very much, whether they featured the humour of everyday people and life, the ordered and mundane, or the more thoughtful and solemn.

Memories are part of the richness of who we are. Memories are fun to review. Yet life moves on. Our loved ones pass on and we grieve for them, but we are still here. We laugh together and we cry together, and we move forward into our futures, enriched by all the people and the memories of our pasts.

To Neil Ieremia and Black Grace: Kia ora, fa’afetai, thank you!

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