Short +Sweet Dance is billed as The Biggest Little Dance Festival in The World. As a format, it started some years ago in Australia, and has now spread to Malyasia, Singapore and New Zealand. Each show offers ten dance works which may be in any style or genre , but which must not be longer than 10 minutes to perform and 30 seconds to get on or off the stage. Anything longer is disqualified.

In the inaugural Auckland Short + Sweet Dance Festival, 2012, there are two groups of 10 works, plus a Wild Card collection of 10 drawn from late applications and works previously screened out. From these 30, 10 are selected to appear in the Gala Final alongside a guest Sweet +Sour Dance winner from elsewhere. One winner gets to be hosted at the next Short + Sweet Dance Festival in Sydney as their guest performers.

A secret panel of judges chooses the finalists, and the audience votes for their favourite performance in each show.

As you might guess, a Short and Sweet Dance show is an unpredictable experience – it’s entirely open slather and it’s a tad difficult to conceive of the criteria the judges might be using as the basis of the competition.

Group 1 presents an array from solo to large group work, with various varieties of contemporary dance, an up to the minute work of social commentary, and a body-paint-dusted acrobatic duet Plain of Lonely Souls, the petite but strongly built Sarah Houboult and the lanky Edward Clendon, which slowly seduces the audience into cheers.

Three works are revisited from earlier incarnations and seem to be only a little changed. Serene Lorimer’s Was…Is has a trio of women retracing their steps and recalling their former selves.  Katie Burton’s triadic serial dance Katie’s Beaten Track  is one of those dances you can see over and over and enjoy every time. This time she adds vocals, reminds us we are at Short +Sweet and urges us to vote for her. And in Preceding the Thread, Chris Tempest and Kate Bartlett continue their engaging exploration of intimate communications and power relations in continuously shared micro-domestic space. He sings sweetly, persuasively, disarmingly, and just when you think he has her where he wants, she melts down, pulls the rug from under him, and resets the terms of their relationship  – for just a moment before a new cycle begins.

Some dances are uninhibitedly crowd-pleasing. Nita Lau’s rich and highly accomplished pacific fusion choreography for Ko’au Eni intermixes all the many dance forms she has experienced and layers them across the stage and back again following cultural dance logic. Danced energetically by 13 dancers in lycra and tapa cloth combos, and accompanied by and 3 drummers, this gets extended applause and lots of vocalisations.

Treat Station’s Twerking in a Shell is also mostly crowd-pleasing , an exploration of their own group dynamics — being a trio of self-confident 20 something young women with more than a few things on their minds.  By turns Sofia McInytre, Jessie McCall and Rose Philpott explore trust, worry, expectation, regret, motivation (give me a kick), before having us watch an extended  twerking clip from You Tube with them. Social acceptability does have some limits after all —  they go to some lengths to explain why they would never twerk.

The relentlessly cute CCB (ChckChck Boom), cupcake kidzdance for five pre-teen girls known as Wasabi Dance Crew, choreographed by their teachers Carlene Newall and Grace Crawford, is crowd-pleasing in their  opwn way — they are confident and vivacious, technically accomplished and definitely look like they are having fun. It’s infectious.  By contrast, the animal-mask wearing Sweaty Heart Productions dancers in Plus Tard (Later, Later On) choose to disavow virtuosity, vivacity and polish in favour of driven movement…

Some works are clearly intended to disconcert. Occupy Town Hall, choreographed by Janine Parkes and Rosey Feltham for BackLit Productions, is formal, serious, with banners waved and slogans chanted, facts delivered  in a quasi-lecture, and repeated gestures running the gamut – giving the finger to the onlookers, flashing the peace sign, shaking threatening fists. Their bodies become an ever-moving target, and sturdily stand their ground against those who would remove them.

The final work in Group 1, Zahra Killen Chance’s GO GO DO, is a masterly movement study which deconstructs several 1960s social dances and  pares them down to pelvic movement essentials — so the hips ride on the legs, and the legs ride on the feet, and torso rides over the rest, and everyone stays pretty much on their spot. It requires utterly secure centering, which is impeccably achieved, and there’s not a lot of sideways motion, just a few wiggles either way – until the very last section when things finally loosen up.  The seven dancers are also wearing the minimum — a casual top and sixties undies, plus sneaker-type footwear. They perform in a line across the stage, arrayed from tallest in the centre to shortest at either end, with faces so deadpan as to be aggressive, particularly when the odd sneer or curled lip creeps in oh so fleetingly. Choreographically intriguing, but emotionally deadening to watch.

Normally in competitive dancing, there’s some specific limited requirements such as a restricted age range, or a specific genre or style, some combination of the two, or else it’s a performance competition, or a choreographic one. But all that is out the window with Short + Sweet – the judges decide what counts. What they decide will no doubt create a good deal of discussion!