Kiwi has five works by New Zealand choreographers, both new and re-staged pieces.

Craig Bary’s Go Home Stay Home has the energy of young people with insights into confusion, isolation and angst skillfully stitched into the choreography. atoms & Eve, a spirited new work by Malia Johnston, has a strongly conceived idea of soloists hiding within a group of dancers.

Tragic Best from Sarah Foster-Sproull makes comic play on the ego and strut of young folk, and keeps a curdled smile on our lips.

Rhapsody, by Michael Parmenter, from 1998, is a welcome reminder of the serenity and sequiturs in his earlier movement vocabulary. (New works seem so much faster and busier with isolation of gestures in the dances made in the ensuing decade. We too rarely have the chance to view retrospective works, and that is such a waste of our best dances.)

Dance for Sixteen, by Raewyn Hill, is her ecstatic choreographic response to Vivaldi. It carries pedigree of her own vision and also pays homage to Douglas Wright’s dance-making. Whoever designed the costumes should be shot, but that is just to say that a work this good deserves better.

[For Jennifer’s review of the Kylian programme, click here.] 

All we need now is for live music to all the above and I will stop reviewing dance because there won’t be much more to say, except Thank You.  
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The New Zealand School of Dance Graduation Kiwi Season proudly showcases the work of five leading New Zealand contemporary choreographers, most of whom are graduates of the school. In a welcome break with tradition, Director Garry Trinder has divided the school’s two dance streams, giving each a chance to shine at their Graduation in their own programme of work.

What immediately becomes apparent on viewing the two programmes back-to-back is that NZSD is producing graduates who can make the transition from classical ballet to contemporary dance with ease, which is a highly desirable skill, given the demands for versatility within the industry.

The Contemporary Dance stream, under the guidance of new Head of Department Paula Steeds-Huston, is in top form and show that they are competent to deliver on a range of performing styles that this diverse group of choreographers demands of them. The styles include high-energy physicality, humorous contortions and movements that take inspiration from the metaphysical.

Malia Johnston’s highly-inventive work, atoms & Eve, created last year for the Unitec dance students, is one of the more physically demanding choreographies involving split-second timing and stylistic uniformity. Cellular groupings of amorphous forms continuously split up and reform into a variety of individual and smaller groupings that create wave upon wave of movement, even when lying on the floor.

The work uses only female dancers, who traverse the stage in long chorus line formations adding layers of clothing or stripping back to minimal flesh-coloured underwear. Johnston creates in a painterly fashion using movement rather than colour to fill her canvas while working in sync with the music of long-time collaborator, Eden Mulholland.

Although it proves difficult to single out performers within the work, it is encouraging to see the uniformity of strength and ability to work as a tight unit that this group of dancers displays.

Upping the ante physically, by several notches, is Go Home Stay Home choreographed by Craig Bary. In restless searching for a place to call home, the dancers move in and out of groupings that are in turn inclusive, overtly hostile or merely disinterested. The dancers’ confidence – as they throw themselves into full-body leaps and are supported with solid partnering – is impressive and they perform in a manner that is fully in the moment.

Danielle Lindsay dances superbly as the trusting soul who is unconscionably bullied and spirals into a miasma of self-deprecation, flailing and flapping on the ground like a beached fish. In a memorable moment, she references an earlier lift where the dancers launch themselves into a backward rolling jump and are caught by their partners – only this time no one catches her and she falls repeatedly to the ground.

Sarah Foster-Sproull continues her exploration of carnival elements with her work Tragic Best. Here she introduces three highly physical clowns, performed with a great deal of hilarity by Zoë Dunwoodie, Shaughn Pegoraro and Jonathan Selvadurai. Their modus operandi is to inflict pain on each other and then to fall-about in frenzied paroxysms of mock agony. It is laugh-out-loud funny.

Next up is a bevy of kewpie dolls who perform their individual and group dances with more than a little Latin flair, but also with a variety of mannered afflictions inhibiting their movement. The dancers totally inhabit these characters and perform this section with enthusiasm, all the while maintaining the requisite straight-face.

Michael Parmenter’s solo Rhapsody has been recreated on Tom Bradley (staged by Steeds-Huston), who performs it with a true lightness of being. The work is created to cover a range of spatial planes, which require full mobility of the torso to achieve. Bradley fulfils this with ease and performs with a grounded sense of self that doesn’t rely on projection to convey its intent.

The final work of the evening, Raewyn Hill’s Dance for Sixteen, literally takes flight, as the dancers dressed in angelic white throw themselves upwards from the floor, legs beating behind them, while suspended in the traditional pose of an angel in-flight. 

Danced to excerpts from Antonio Vivladi’s Laudate Pueri, Dominum, the work is a literal hymn of praise, beautifully realised by the young dancers who perform the movements with conviction. Hill’s intention to portray the Zen notion of the transience of the present moment in time is achieved through continuous movement, with the dancers spiralling, falling, lifting and suspending their bodies in space, through a variety of dynamic groupings. 

It is a treat to see such a variety of New Zealand Contemporary Choreographers in one programme and a pleasure to see their work realised by a group of passionate and strong young dancers such as these. It bodes well for their future in the world of dance. 

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