Ngaro (hidden, out of sight, lost) crawls over your skin, it seeps into your bones and you find yourself asking; am I present? Am I okay?

Opening the annual Tempo Dance Festival, Louise Potiki Bryant brought Ngaro to life with her irrefutable choreographic talent and multimedia flair. 

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The transformative capacity of art is celebrated in Ngaro (hidden, out of sight, lost), an intensely immersive solo dance performance and installation by Louise Potiki Bryant.

Integrating choreography and film by Potiki Bryant, sound by Paddy Free (Pitch Black) and clothing by Rona Ngahuia Osborne (Native Agent), Ngaro examines Potiki Bryant’s experience of living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and finding ways to incorporate it into her art.

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NGARO, a new interdisciplinary dance work by Louise Potiki Bryant, made in collaboration with composer Paddy Free and artist Rona Ngahuia Osborne, opens Tempo Dance Festival 2017. Aptly named  (ngaro means hidden, out of sight or lost), this issue-based work is thought-provoking, foregrounding the subject of mental health from personal and multi-media perspectives.

This new work is complex, with many layers. Interwoven through the performance is an exploration of Hinengaro – the hidden feminine and atua, or deity, of the mind, consciousness, and awareness. These aspects are revealed in particular during the last section.

Gritty and raw, this solo is structured into several sections where we witness the struggles and conflicting voices from different periods of a journey towards wholeness, finishing with a luscious reawakening (rebirth), danced in a white long-fringed cloak which Potiki Bryant sweeps across the stage and at other times wraps around herself.

The performance opens with a figure in black facing upstage wearing a square black kete over her head. Surrounding her head and above on a wall is a giant sphere of colourful Post-it notes. The figure gradually moves up towards the ball of Post-its in a move- and-freeze repeated pattern, ending up in perched positions on a ledge. It is as if the thoughts in her head are taking over and making her groundless.  The power of this impression is increased by video projections of blurred people in the streets speeding by, coupled with an increase in the intensity of the soundscore.  

Subsequently, she returns to the floor and slowly peels the kete from her head. At the front of the stage are twelve lighted squares which attract her attention. Each one lights up individually, and as she puts her hand over a light to extinguish it, another one lights up. As she continues to try and extinguish the lights, she counts, initially in Maori, tahi, rua, toru, wha…  and then switches to English.  This repetitive sequence of actions gets faster and faster and she frenetically tries to shut down the lights. Her counting, interchanging in Maori and English, finishes in a sudden climax, a clever and surprising twist, as the lighted squares are revealed to be piles of white Post-it notes. She scatters them across the stage in a cascade of falling paper.

Post-it notes recur throughout the piece, at times being worn on eyes and body as a shield or label, and shown on film stuck on a subway wall where they are added to or the text is read by passers-by.  In my mind, these notes suggest the many differing dissonant voices competing in this society today, contributing to sensory overload.

The images of people walking past Post-its are projected onto giant lengths of fabric that hang like huge banners  Later these lengths of fabric transform into what look like stark white giant glasses with twisted stems reaching to the floor.  Textured black lines against the white fabric further add to the visual feast 

Recurring movement motifs such as covering the eyes, turning fingers over eyes as if to scoop them out, deep squats, and hands over her belly, appear and morph throughout.  Frequently the eyes are covered, and I interpret these as a direct reference to being hidden/ out of sight.

The expertise of collaborators Paddy Free and Rona Ngahuia Osborne is woven into the fabric of this work along with Potiki Bryant’s own contributions of choreography, videography, and performance. Vibrant music / sound and textile design contribute seamlessly to the richness and complexity of this work.

With more performances and a few less predictable changes of set this piece will develop and grow raising social issues very prevalent in New Zealand today. Louise Potiki Bryant and her collaborators have successfully taken on the role of the artist to raise difficult issues not readily spoken about.

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