Our Jurisdiction celebrates artificiality then relieves tension with human touch and a warm breeze.

Swathes of thin plastic loft and fall as props. Emma Broad winds it over her shoulder like a sailor’s rope, then smooths it down her front like drapery. Lulu Qiu’s swathe settles over her like a tent. Of hers, Evie Logan makes her bedding.

Following robotic (birdlike, a friend thinks) and sewing machine movements under a futuristic music of clicks, the trio adopt their swathes as veils. The veils frame their faces, accentuating how non-human and alert they appear. There’s a sci-fi feeling.

After a blackout, artificial smiles arrive. The dancers have shed their simple dresses and are now dolls fabricating their dance to 70s vibe music and sun-yellow lit.

In an initially strict scene, Logan comes on stage with a clipboard. She scatters a bag of Duplo in front of the others. ‘Field notes,’ she announces, giving the exact time, and introducing an experiment in which the two will illustrate ‘matter colliding’ and ‘time and space’ by stacking the Duplo with the concentration of toddlers, one snatching a block from the other. Except the scene quickly matures as they begin piling the Duplo on each other, and cooperating in this – Broad keeps an extended arm level. The precarity escalates as the blocks are not locked in but balanced any way, even sideways. Soon an unusual and beautiful, lazy gesture – Broad is passing Qiu blocks to stack on Broad’s own body. Intimate. Human connection.

And Our Jurisdiction plays with living connection. In another scene Logan and Qiu’s palms orbit one another, embraces are implied but not sealed, until finally their hands do connect, leading into tentative touch with other, wider planes of the body, leading almost to rest, certainly into new territory.

Once the robotic and jerky sequences are behind us, the dancers come into their own in some exquisite lyrical solos, notably one by Qiu with a soft and relaxed air to her movements. She has a beautiful way of swelling her movements over the whole length between, rather than arriving early and waiting for the next one. A completeness.

The rustle of thin plastic. The dancers are scarecrows impersonating lyrical ballet. Like AI, quickly they learn fluidity, remaining adorably subject to breezes blowing them together. Collisions soon become more graceful, more human.

A soothing, recurring motif of the dancers very slowly turning while tilting side to side like sailboats, an image perhaps brought to mind by an opening projection of a seashore. 

I don’t feel I understood the concept behind Our Jurisdiction. I would have loved a narrower, more concrete description in the programme, of how Deborah Fletcher choreographs. Saying that, the choreography explored many styles and tempos, with originality.

N.b. Some floorwork is obscured as the New Athaneum seating is not tiered.

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The audience is invited into a supernatural world. White plastic sheeting obscures the black walls of the Basement Theatre, and the dancers are adorned in white cotton. The crinkling sound of the material punctuates intervals of brown and white noise, silence, and rhythmic electronic that make up the music score. This is a world of dynamic entanglements as expressed by the entwined draping of semi-transparent sheets. 

Our Jurisdiction holds time hostage; a distortion reiterated in movement. The choreography cycles through gestures that become fresher with each pass and hypnotically soothe my usual impatience—by no means a small feat. The show starts with a film; a dancer walks towards camera from a distance along an overcast Piha beach. There is a satisfaction as our anticipation quietly builds over the long duration of the shot. That same gentle use of time is echoed across distinctive sections: body isolations in total unison, a dynamic solo highlighting Emma Broad’s unique presence, a duet that expresses tender exploratory touch, a cheeky moment to pop music in another language… all (and more) strategically paced and compellingly recurrent. 

Dancers enter the stage and fall into a seamless unison of body isolations. Movement that starts percussively, moving rhythmically through gestures, begins to metamorphosize into a vibrant flow. The plastic sheets become a second skin to be adorned and shed at key moments of the dancers’ journey, resembling different selves fading into each other. In one section, ethereal plastic dresses are carefully plucked from the ceiling and transform the dancers into three drifting swirling figures.

It takes a skillful choreographer to create a rehearsal environment that supports relationship and community as Deborah Fletcher has. I can sense love and trust rooted in the choreographic process. The dancers move with an assurance and synchronicity that only comes with familiarity and contentment. Three bodies move in sync as if they are one body and one body performing a solo becomes many. (I later learned that the trio, Emma Broad, Evie Logan, and Lulu Qiu, relationship was forged in the fires of university.) 

This robust collaboration of the contributing artists has created a provoking journey through an evocative transient world. I could inhabit this world much longer than the current run time – to enjoy sitting deeper into the silences, stillness, and choreographed cycles that made this work precious. That kind of peace is so often lost and overlooked. 

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