The word ‘review’ can feel impoverished in meaning at times to describe the process I find myself getting tangled up inside as a ‘reviewer.’ Old Hat, Fresh Pain, a nuanced and riveting double-bill show, made that especially clear last night.

Connotations linger around the term ‘review’… “performance review,” “product review…” memes abound within a dominant techno-capitalist culture where everything is measured against some other more powerful thing — where what prevails is an objectifying logic, a representational logic that assumes art is a static artefact that can be viewed from some distant, value-neutral place (or as close to that as possible). In that logic, to re-view is to capture the experience of something in words, which are then supposed to accurately represent what happened, as well as analyze and interpret what happened as something separate from what is still continuing to happen within the ‘interpreter.’ 

But the magic of performance is that it can so radically transgress the boundary between self-other, between performer-observer, even as it constructs and plays within these boundaries. Watching Old Hat, Fresh Pain I was struck by the way a show can exert itself as a living, relational process, entangled with its observers. It feels as though the patterns moving through the bodies of the dancers and the materiality of the production design have now infiltrated my body with their echoes and snags and tendrils, living out their winding, pulsing rhythms through my thoughts, enlisting my synapses for their continued iteration in written form. To me, shows are alive and have agency which appeals to (or perhaps possess!) our bodies and minds for their doings.

As Miriam Eskildsen asks in her programme notes “how do you love with an infested heart?” I find myself asking – true…and how do I ‘review’ with one? 

Together, Sea of Split Peas and Magpies at the Diner left me pondering the animate webs of agency we are woven within. The aliveness that bristles in the spaces between self/other, human/animal, conscious/unconscious, individual/collective. 

I attribute some of this pondering as being conjured by the mana and presence of Old Folks Association. This is a venue which is not, like purpose-built, black-box theatres, obliged to the quirky western obsession with creating a backdrop of empty, sterile, void space in which to do art; a space where the art can pretend to sit unaffected by our built environments and their stories, seemingly emerging out of the ether, out of nothingness. At Old Folks, space is thick with stories and with time. There’s the peeling paint, occasional memoirs on the walls to the Old Folks themselves, a crinkle-cut curtain partition, and tender wooden floors that have been polished by the feet of artists, healers, community organizers over countless years. Lit by Grace Bella’s thoughtful and simple lighting design, both pieces felt at home in this space in their design, costuming and in the sensitivity of the dancers.

Kenzie Crompton designed the silky purples and creams clothing the three dancers in A Sea of Split Peas, by Jess Crompton. Combined with the nurturing melancholy of Brandon Ross’s sound design — which includes what sounds to my untrained ears like the peachy tones of a xylophone — I perceive the dancers as three close friends at a sleep-over. The first sequence of the dancers lying supine, shoulder to shoulder, performing a fluid, soothing, intimate choreography of synchronized touch, rolling, elevations and yummy variations on spooning – reminds me of those intimate chats lying awake at night in the lamplight at your friend’s house. You’re all in one bed, or you’re camped out on the floor marae-style, sharing your secrets, admitting things you wouldn’t normally share in the light of day. The gently iridescent silver waistcoat with turquoise detailing, worn by Katie Burton, along with the repeated reclining postures and tableaux’s which create satisfying creases and drapery in the fabrics — all of this produces a subtly mythopoetic quality. It’s not just any sleepover, it’s some archetypal sleepover, a sleepover which is low-key happening in the god-realm, being dreamt about by someone unseen. This gentle otherworldly energy is reinforced by the three, striking paper-maché moon-faces present on stage. White, grey, contorted, they sit like timeless boulders – their deeply-riven facial expressions reminiscent of masks in ancient Greek tragedies. In a choreography of both reluctance and pressing need for mutual-support, the dancers pick up their assigned moon-rock faces and figure out how to be with them. They place their faces inside them to become moon-rock-faced beings. They negotiate them, become possessed by them, avoid them. In Dan-Yel James solo, a masked choreography makes for some surreal shapeshifting. Katie Burton’s moon-face bears an expression of crushed exhaustion. In her poignant solos of assured, purposeful movement, carving through space, culminating in pauses of shimmering, vibrating shapes that seem to question the fraught boundaries between her and the others, I am reminded of the fatigue of having to navigate when and where it is safe to relax and to be held when you are assigned the role of enduring care-taker. Tessa Redman brings a magnetic, lush, brat-energy to what feels like an exploration of unowned and exonerated anxiety. Jess Crompton’s choreography is insightful and spacious. I enjoy how moments are given the time and attentiveness to resonate in space. Intimate rhythms of partnering, gesture, pause, observation, repetition and return are combined with the storytelling of simple embraces and tableaux, of lyricism and song. I see the dynamics of projection, enmeshment, co-dependence, and disentangling. I see Elliott Smith’s ode to the “people you’ve been before, that you don’t want around anymore,” — how these three friends attempt to caretake their own and each other’s fugitive personas. One of my favorite moments is when two moon-face masks are placed down next to each other, facing each other like two boulders on a river bank deep in conversation. The simple aliveness and multiplicity of these props makes me love art.

Costuming in Magpies at the Diner is also well-integrated into the qualities of the venue and the work’s internal world-building. Magda Smolira and Miriam Eskildsen have dressed the dancers in white and beige laces, leotards, frills and ruffs, resembling tail feathers and plumages as well as a clown-like, commedia dell’arte aesthetic. White make-up by Raven Afoa-Purcell over the eyes and noses of the dancers, with red and green shadings, intensifies both this expressive clown quality and references the colourings of birds. The set design, a set of drawers and cupboards pinched between the OFA partition curtains,  furnished with additional miniature frames complete with their own Punch-n-Judy-esque pastel stage curtains, reinforces the clown/commedia dell’arte energy and also casts my mind in mild horror back to the Australian childrens’ television show “High Five”, which included a woman whose set was a background of endless cupboards from which different wiggly creatures and hands and objects jumped out of when she wasn’t looking. I get the same, slightly squeamish and hysterical kid-feeling watching hands and dangling gloves and bodies and faces wriggle and appear and disappear through these cupboards and curtains. At one point, Jane Smolira opens a cupboard door and reveals herself nonchalantly observing the stage and its activities from inside. I feel an urge to cackle loudly but I don’t because something new happens and I’m too transfixed again. The timing, rhythms, and dramaturgical development in this work keep me on the edge of my seat. Each one of the dancers deserves their own review. Eskilsden’s choreography is striking and always surprising. It is often staccato, gestural, angular; a layering of teeming, shape-shifting attitudes that reveals how endlessly rich bodies can be with vernacular. The performance vocabulary teeters this line between dance, theatre and clowning that is distinct and original. I find myself wondering about the relationships Eskildsen builds with the dancer/collaborators to co-create these coherent, characterful sequences. Each solo, duet, and group sequence harnesses the dancers’ powerful technical ability as well as the fresh, startling, heart-on-a-plate expression of their unique bodies. Magpies at the Diner excels in exploring “theatricality as a form of vulnerability.” I found myself thinking beyond human theatricality and acknowledging all life, all things even, as poignantly performative and rhythmic, as deeply seeking connection, co-regulation, to be seen. 

I leave this show feeling empowered by the way art can conjure the woven aliveness of the material world, and the shapeshifting of humans within it. I want everyone to see these artists works, and also I can’t help wanting these works to stay in porous, unapologetically alive spaces like Old Folks. Something about this space, its intimacy and humbleness, made the work more than something to go and experience as an escape from the world, instead I felt myself in a performance that seemed to activate and ritualize the world it was breathing with. 

Perhaps, along with the stories chattering away in the walls of the OFA whare, it was the carefully written programme notes that intensified this sense of interwovenness with the wider world that cannot be ignored. In bold text beneath both choreographer’s programme statements, there is an acknowledgement of the global context that this performance is occurring within; a context of genocide unfolding before our eyes daily, slaughter broadcasted in our pockets. From reading this mihi I felt mind restitched again to Gaza, and heart encouraged to stay present with the trouble, weight and pain of the time we are currently in. As the artists write in bold: “Horror doesn’t describe” what is happening, what we are witnessing, what Palestinians are going through, “nothing does.” These works explore the subtleties around how it is we become to be so sensitively human, and such sensitivities are made all the more activating thinking of the families in Palestine right now. It’s the rich subtleties of human experience, the simple dramas that we live out in our friendships, families, with our pets and landscapes and work and play – that are being stripped away and denied from a whole people, from children and babies. May more art be made that mobilizes us to keep acting and to deconstruct the apathy that distance and privilege can create. May all the art made now mihi in solidarity until ceasefire and an end to the occupation is achieved, until globally, collectively we realize enduring freedom for Palestinian people and all peoples suffering under settler colonial regimes.

If you are reading this and live in Tāmaki Makaurau, come and join the march run by Palestinian Youth Aotearoa this Saturday 24^th Feb, 3pm at Britomart. In other of parts of Aotearoa, check your local events and get there. The IDF is closing in on Gazans trapped in Rafah – we must put all the pressure we can muster on our politicians to stand against genocide. 

Details for the march to Stand Against Genocide this Saturday (tomorrow):https://www.facebook.com/events/945979259754819/?ref=newsfeed

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