HIVE is a sophisticated and enriching immersive performance that combines dance, theatre, site-specific installation, rhythmic video projections, and live and pre-recorded music. Created by dance artist Julia Harvie and visual artist Stuart Lloyd-Harris, the production considers, amongst other things, how the social and physical structures of the past collapse into the present, and we (as a nascent community, as individuals), look forward to the future. It makes terrific use of a space within the neo-Gothic Christchurch Arts Centre complex, which was badly damaged in the earthquakes, and which has been undergoing one of the largest heritage restoration projects of its type in the in the world. There’s an unabashed sense of curiosity as we head (wearing hi-viz, Canterbury chic) into the partially restored Engineering extension. It once acted as the home of the Court Theatre, and before that a Canterbury College lecture theatre; in the future it will act as something else that brings people together.

We are welcomed into the dim space by dancers Sarah Elsworth, Kosta Bogoievski and Josie Archer, who are dressed in simple skirts and smocks, and who divide us into our groups: workers, queens and drones. A dreamy projected video reminds us to experience, to look after one another, to enrich one another. Someone near me whispers that it feels a bit like Black Mirror, but this production has no interest in anything dystopian, even if the soft, sing-song tones and the benign expressions of the performers would raise alarm bells in another context. Instead, HIVE is interested in how we choose to and are forced to live with one another, and the implications of our interconnectedness on other people and our environment.

In the first half of the performance we are led, in our assigned groups, through the maze-like pathways that are created by tall sacks of heritage material: wooden beams, collections of floorboards, all marked and tagged and ready for eventual reinstallation or re-appropriation. It’s a hazy space lit in pinks and purples and pooled with shadow. A shimmering electronic score textures the space. This gives a sense of warmth and closeness that offsets the fact that it’s pretty bloody cold, the mist of our breaths mingling with the thick, sweetly-scented theatre smoke.

Our leaders take us gently through a series of activities, or perhaps meditations, that reflect upon the space, its uses, our memories and our relationships to one another. Those who are allergic to any form of audience participation can be safe that there’s nothing ‘gotcha’ or cynical about our participation; instead, it’s an invitation to connect. I am in a group of drones, led by Kosta Bogoievski, and I am taken by the way that his initially descriptive account of how this space might soon look – rococo columns, flying buttresses, images of the best of New Zealand – becomes first breathless and then thrashing and frenzied. The beautiful trappings of the past become a fetish.

Soon we become a more traditional audience, seated in a circle and lighting the performance space with our headlamps. Here the movement work is more emotionally and physically confrontational, as it explores how we might try to exert agency when we have little control. Bogoievski and Archer present a vulnerable, vital duet that marries intense intimacy with frustration, expressing the comfort and the pain that comes from mutual dependency through caresses and pinches. Elsworth’s monologue about petty childhood indiscretions opens up space for more demanding and abstract physical and vocal expressions of resentment. Bodies twist and strike; the production’s gentle temp ramps up; voices strain. The dancers are accompanied by cellist Nicole Reddington, whose electronically amplified performance is by turns yearning, urgent and melancholy, punctuated by grunts and sighs. This is the sort of stuff that lodges a lump square in my throat – how can we live together, when to be together is also to be both alone and overwhelmed by the immutable fact of our unremitting connectedness?

By the end, though, we are able to move through the hall freely with a new perspective, as it is now both a fixed space that channels us through life, and an open playground in which we can run and hide. We can also reconsider the recurring motifs in the show’s dance vocabulary: the tapping and flicking of fingers, the running hands down faces in relief and frustration, shake it off. HIVE finishes with a joyous and rushing sense of energy as we are invited to dance in a celebration of our relationships and the opportunities they bring. It’s a gorgeous, textured production about the power of community, and an exquisite use of the Arts Centre’s developing space, that will leave your heart full.

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