If I only had 1 word to describe PANGO, I would say – Honest. So, let me be completely honest about my thoughts regarding PANGO. You will have missed an opportunity if you let this pass you by.

The truths that are being expressed so vividly in PANGO strike a primal chord within me.  After all, this is my genealogy Atamira is exploring on this stage. It is the genesis of my ancestors, of my family, of my future grandchildren.  And as I watch it unfold, I am grateful for this stunning retelling from Moss Patterson and his talented crew.  

Watching PANGO, I am reminded that Te Kore is the infinite expanse of our potential. Te Kore, from where all life began. The nothingness and all its many possibilities. I came here tonight simply hoping that I wouldn’t end up cringing, and instead I am captured, unable to look away. The many facets of Te Kore are explored in articulate movements that tug at memories buried in my bones. Like a song I have sung a thousand times, but not understood the meaning of, until now.  It makes me glad of the dark lighting which hides my reaction to the raw honesty on display.

The music is a weaving of the ancient and the present day. Traditional instruments are masterfully played by James Webster, joined together with the contemporary sounds of Shayne Carter’s guitar. The place at which these two strands are woven into each other is at times painful in their intensity. The emotion of the music combined with the emotional movements are such sweet pain. But, the keen edge I’m riding is given no reprieve. Because the visuals created by Rowan Pierce are like the hammer coming down. The images, the symbolism is surely channelled from our ancestors. They are eerily accurate in their presentation and their effect is stunning.

However, this story is so much more than a creation story. It is heavy with the truths of our nation and our fledgling identity.  PANGO makes me hope that we can be less about maintaining control, and more about freeing our potential.

Nga mihi maioha mo tenei taonga.

Nga mihi, nga mihi, nga mihi nui.

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Much has been written about Atamira Dance Company’s work, Pango.  Originally commissioned for the 2016 Pulima Arts Festival in Taiwan, it also featured in China’s Guangdong Dance Festival and had its NZ premiere in Wellington in the same year.  Now, almost 2 years later, it is here, in Turanganui-a-Kiwa/Gisborne.  

Atamira’s expressed kaupapa is to ‘bring Maori contemporary dance theatre out to regional communities around Aotearoa’.  Their performance in the War Memorial Theatre last night was the second of a 2018 seven-city North Island tour, which includes Napier, New Plymouth, Tauranga, Hamilton, Whangarei and Auckland.

Described by critics as emotionally raw, multi-layered, disturbing, breathtaking, at times indulgent, a primal adventure, powerful, thought-provoking and chilling, how does a reviewer coming fresh to Pango find new adjectives, new angles, to discuss this already highly acclaimed work?  

In a recent interview published in the NZ Herald, choreographer Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, speaks of his motivation for this work: ‘I’m interested in empowering brown people … creating greater respect and practising openness and understanding. We need to have courageous conversations with everyone. This piece is a courageous conversation.’

These words have special resonance for us, here in Gisborne, one year out from Tuia 250 – the national commemorations of first meetings between Maori and Pakeha.  Those meetings began here, in Turanganui-a-Kiwa, 249 years ago.  There has been much media coverage, letters to the editor and editorial commentary in relation to next year’s commemorations, many calling for just such a ‘courageous conversation’, one conducted in that very spirit of ‘greater respect, openness, understanding’. 

It is these words I have in mind when the performance begins. 

In the beginning, the void, Te Kore, in which all is potential. The skeletal outlines of a wharenui frame a dark stage. Pango. Black. On opposite sides are two musicians, each in his own shaft of light, both masters of different musical instruments  – one, taonga puoro, the other, electric guitar.  There is breathing. Chanting. Karakia. A flash of light, and we begin to discern a clump of bodies in centre stage.  One emerges, and to the compulsive sounds of the electric guitar, begins to dance, sinuous then angular, staccato then legato. Undulating. Prototype number 1. 

And so the framework is set.  As each dancer emerges from the amorphous mass, different potential forms reveal themselves – aggressive, tentative, vulnerable, rapacious.  Four of the six dancers are new to this year’s production.  Each brings his uniqueness to the stage, and all are committed, stunningly agile movers.  There is also much striking ensemble dancing.  One particularly vivid sequence elicits a collective gasp from those around me, when the dancers form a kind of whakairo, arms and elbows framing staring heads which move in different directions before falling back into the maelstrom.

Pango is a potent mix of both Maori movement and contemporary dance. I discern echoes of Les Noces (Nijinska’s 1923 work for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes) in a formation of stacked heads, and of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s tai-chi informed style in Luke Hanna’s tender exploration of possible fingers and toes.  There are suggestions of shrunken heads as one dancer holds two others by their long ponytails, manipulating them in a masterly yet macabre threesome, a kind of gruesome dance of death.  And there are hints of a seated Buddha, a many-limbed Siva. 

The first half of the work explores this primordial space.  But then, from the void, from the shuddering, pulsing, grunting and foot-stamping, from the conjuring up of ihi through whirling steel poi, from the headlong running in ever-quickening circles, out of the accelerating vortex … LIFE.  Tihei mauri ora!  In a breathtaking sequence of projections onto the six perfectly still, standing bodies of the dancers, we are shown the creation of Man – first bones, then heart, then blood, nerves and flesh.  It is surreal, weirdly technical, making me think of robots, artificial intelligence. But then the natural world emerges, relaxing us with its wind, sun, bush, light, and birdcalls.

In this moment of creation, we see the exposed vulnerability of the newborn. And in the aching soliloquy which follows – accumulating phrases beautifully delivered by dancer Manu Reynard – we are confronted with the perilous nature of the human condition.

Just when I think the work ends here, a shaft of light, a moving figure, ushers in the inevitable descent. There is a viscerally confronting scene of an apparent disembowelling, the feeding from bodies thereof, and of men made mad with blood.

Pango is indeed ‘a courageous conversation’.  But there is more than one conversation going on here. At first, the dancers seem to be interrogating different sides of themselves – masculine/feminine, vulnerable/strong, gentle/savage – as well as conversing with each other.

The musicians too, are conversing with the dancers, playing to the emotions evoked by their movements, the dancers in turn responding to the physical vibrations of sound – Shayne Carter’s heavy electric guitar and James Webster’s masterful taonga puoro playing – different, yet created in the same spirit. 

Then there are the conversations between te ao Maori through karakia and chants, and te ao pakeha via spoken English.  And pulling it all together, Robin Rawstorne’s haunting design and Rowan Pierce’s inspired projections and side lighting, conversing with the dancers’ bodies, throwing silhouettes beyond the stage onto the walls of the auditorium itself.   

Finally, there is the conversation Pango has with us, the audience. We are moved in such a way that forces us to think – about what we could be, about the inevitability of change, about our own fragility and mortality.

Leaving the theatre, I am reeling with questions I still need to investigate.  At what point might exuberance tip into aggression? Does the ‘human condition’ have to be this way?  Does dancer Jeremy Beck’s powerful soliloquy: ‘I’m hungry, FEED ME!’  go beyond the obvious state of needing to be fed, to suggest a different kind of hunger? – a hunger for one’s culture, for peace, for empathy, for Art? 

When a dance theatre work forces us to think in this way, we know it is a success.  And when a Maori contemporary dance theatre work succeeds in opening our eyes and hearts to te ao Maori and beyond, we know that such an exchange of arts, can, and will, inform Aotearoa’s cultural growth. 

I would love to see Atamira’s artistic collaborators bring their vision, commitment and courage to creating a new work around the theme of First Meetings – in time for October 2019? – building on what we have learnt so far, and what we have yet to make sense of.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

A black stage with a Wharenui created of black rope and stainless steel.  Two musical setups, one either side of this framework.  I remember a similar structure from 11 years ago, in the last work of Moss Patterson’s that I had the pleasure of viewing and feeling.  Like that work, tonight’s work is emotionally raw and exceptionally multilayered. 

Pango/Black danced by Atamira Dance Company was put together in only four days of deep and beautifully challenging work from this talented group on male dancers.  Originally seeded from an intense period of studying in 2016, Patterson explores the primordial space of Te Kore, the realm of potential being, The Void. 

In the programme, Patterson notes, “Pango translated means Black.  In Māori culture, black is associated with three states of evolution, creation, and being.”  These men were asked to bring their WHOLE selves to this work.  Each came with his own personal story and response to Patterson’s original explorations.  With this recent process, the dancers explored Te Kore for themselves. What is their place of personal darkness? Where they can go no lower, this is where one can rise from.  The work is cyclical on stage, as it was in the creation process.  Improvisation, sit and reflect, deconstruct, interpretation, refine, move forward, improvisation etc.  Life is cyclical. 

Patterson himself, grew up in a wharenui, surrounded by the kōwhaiwhai and whakairo coming to life.  His own whakapapa can be traced back 78 generations to The Beginning.  We see this in the work: at times breathtaking, at times disturbing, at times indulgent.  I think the work has finished three times but each time it comes back to life.  Maybe the transitions are a bit underdone; maybe not. 

I come from a long dance background and I can feel and see what is happening before me in dance language.  However, I only feel slightly limited in my understanding of this work based only on the fact that as a white New Zealander, I do have an alliance with Māori culture but no indigenous cultural understanding, and extremely limited language (inspiring myself to restart my Te Reo).

Shayne Carter brings his cosmic guitar sounds to this work, giving another worldly layer that runs under, over and through the work.  I cannot tell if the guitar initiates the dancers or the dancers initiate the guitar.  Master taonga pūoro player James Webster grounds us to the work with his instruments, along with haunting and hypnotic chanting through the darkness.  This work has to have live music and Carter and Webster bring it home with a symbiosis of energy and sound, feeding the dancers while the dancers feed them. 

Stunning AV from Rowan Pierce also delivers the intended theme of the cyclical nature of the work.  Gorgeous silhouettes on the theatre walls from his lighting design also add to the tone.

Thank you so very very much Atamira, from the bottom of our regional hearts.  We needed this work.  We want more.  Feed us!  We’re hungry! 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Last night the Toi Maori Art Market presented Pango /Black by Atamira Dance Company at the Wellington Opera House, a moving production encapsulating contemporary dance, lighting effects, live music, and the spoken word.

The six male dancers give a strong, fully committed, mesmerising performance, with the commitment to the story they are telling clearly apparent. According to Maori the states of evolution or progression towards creation are Te Kore: energy, potential, the void, nothingness.

And this is what we see.  It is a moment, thoughtfully choreographed by Moss Patterson, which will linger for quite some time.

Atamira take their audience on this journey, travelling through the concept of nothingness, through the void before time, with profound skill. In the darkness we see shadows, pulsating shapes driving forwards towards a spark. A sound, a flash of light, energy forms. There is silence all around me as people bear witness to the experience.

The space, created by award-winning Rawstorne Studios, is dark and compelling. It draws us deeper, its starkness completing the moment. Live guitar by Shayne Carter combines with theTaonga Puoro (traditional Maori instruments) by James Webster.

The lighting design throughout is superb but nothing prepares us for the climax when the skeletons of the dancers’ bodies are lit up in varying shades of orange and red. It feels like we have entered the space of man. An exclamation of awe is expelled into the crowd. Changing imagery follows, chasing the passage of time, projected onto the blank canvas of who we will become.

A voiceover echoes ‘and who I could be – for I will not be much…’ And finally the future is poised.

It is a spiritual and thought provoking experience. There should be more work of this calibre and stature appearing on our New Zealand stage.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer