A note from the Dance Editor: Somewhat longer than our usual reviews, this is a summary of the Ōtautahi Tiny Performance Festival by Kosta Bogoievski. The festival aims: ‘to be a new kind of festival, a platform and a community hub for the next wave of performance makers and audiences in Ōtautahi’.  Refer to https://www.tinyfest.co.nz

I’m working on a whim here. I didn’t anticipate writing an entire overview, agreeing to review a few dance works but since catching most of the festival it felt like a story worth sharing. Had I known I was going to do this prior to the opening I would have scribbled notes throughout. I’m racking my brain to remember everything I can here… here goes…

The programme was crazy. I needed to see it all. Having a spot in this jam packed festival myself, I was too ambitious in trying to catch everything. Stress and sensibleness got the better of me and so I’ll start this by stating what I missed: Violet French duo and Bin Day; Mothers in Arts open discussion with Julia Harvie; Cream Puff and E-Kare present In the Pit of Eternal Potential and I am not your Dusky Maiden by Juanita Hepi and Byllie-Jean Zeta.

Opening Night:

7pm Keynote speaker Pelenakeke Brown 

Pelenakeke Brown kicked off the festival from her bed. Classic zoom introduction. I like that zoom meetings afford the casual address that naturally comes with the speaker’s intimate living spaces apparent in view. She mentions her partner’s reminder to breathe as she speaks to us. I hear the us in Little Andromeda’s theatre spontaneously inhale with her. This is for her to slow down and she pauses a couple more times throughout the speech, “breathing,” she’ll say.

After giving us an overview of her creative journey, particularly in New York City, discussing the terms ‘disabled’ (the Americans with Disabilities Act has allowed US citizens to claim the term Disability) and ‘immigrant’ (observing that ‘expat’ is reserved for pakeha artists versus their POC counterparts oft described as immigrants), she rallies those who are yearning to do what they love, to quit that job they hate, to seek their true calling. Brown exclaims, ‘If you need a sign. This is it. I’m that sign!’ Lightening up, inspiring (though humbly repeating she wasn’t), and opening the festival.

Pelenakeke Brown reminded us Tāmaki had passed its hundredth day of lockdown. With an anniversary of a death in her family and recalling the light and the dark Hōhepa Waitoa referred to in the festival Mihi Whakatau, she invited us to bring loved ones we have lost into the room. Tears. We were already emotional before the speech began. It was an emotional opening, as festivals can be but Tiny Fest happens to be, in 2021, one of the last live performance festivals standing in the country. That this festival forged on amid uncertainty, panic, program reshuffling, and festivals & events dropping like flies around it, is to be acknowledged. Acknowledgement of the stress of the producers, tech team, and artists* as well, for the swift time frame with which to set up and then do the festival. And now over the line, the marathon of events ensued…

*Artists and producers alike worked their butts off night and day. I heard the cast of I’m not your Dusky Maiden rehearsing, singing beautiful waiata most weeknights ‘til 10pm below my flat, in the MAP studio, leading up to the festival.

Day One:

10am Gay Death Stock Take by Nathan Joe

A bit about the title: a personal stock take at the proverbial death when a gay man’s best years is said to come to an end. It was a birthday party, a funeral with a personal obituary, a last confession. Nathan brought the necessary festive energy to Tiny’s 10am beginning. It set the tone of the festival’s ‘raw, real, radical’ banner.

Nathan blew up his confessional work within the time pressured structure of a game. He surrounded himself with numbered balloons planted with the sequence of the show, each with a different provocation: audience participation, Q&A, spoken word, letters to future self, letters to past self, lists of personal history, reflections about relationships and exes, aspirations, achievements, cake, silent disco. The set up thrust Nathan into relentless performance and inadvertently brought to the fore his manic artistry in the intermittent moments between script, darting around the room with his idiosyncratic run, gasps, and cries for help.

He answered silent concerns about being able to say ‘feeling old’ at thirty and what he actually means when he says this. Among the explanations was the deflated aspiration of becoming a wunderkind. Examples of both wunderkinds and late bloomers are listed and a picture of Xavier Dolan in our goodie bag, “I guess what I’m trying to say is fuck you Xavier Dolan.” He speaks honestly of aspirations, self-loathing (today and in youth), and achievements. His answer to his younger self: assuredly gay (still) yet single but his goals, values, and priorities have shifted.

He surprised the audience when he answers ‘no’ to a question about whether he is proud of what he has achieved—this was a day before being awarded the Bruce Mason prize for playwriting, no less!

11.30am Solo for a Body by Alice Weber

All performances bar one (Sara’s site specific work) occur at the Ron Ball Studio, Christchurch Symphony Orchestra’s rehearsal room. Tiny Fest fashioned a black box out of the diamond shaped room. Unfortunately the fit out didn’t quite do Weber’s work justice as the big screen that remained for the entirety of the festival loomed just a few inches above the performers’ heads. It was a distraction for several works but given the nature of this particular show I would have loved to have seen it in a more considered arrangement, it had the cool, clean, conceptual choreography that fits a gallery. Tino Seghal and Maria Hassabi come to mind, though this iteration of Weber’s work has an ephemeral nature that the traditional performance setting affords, a beginning and end. The comparisons I drew to the artists above render their performers creative objects, reduced to an element of their atemporal artwork. Anu Khapung, Chloe Summerhayes, and Olivia McGregor are the spectacle that enact a steadily unfolding score. We enter the room as they are backward-rolling about the stage and continue to do so as the door closes and lights dim.

A bit about the title: the titular name for an ongoing project that came about during undisturbed studio practice that also nursed a break up, the rolling was a natural response and embodied effect.

Virtuosity is found in the repeated action that circles the women around the room and each other. The efficacy of the mechanics of the body sometimes effaces subjectivity. They undress while rolling and then the performance markedly moves towards us, our gaze and relationship to the three women’s bodies. Their gaze is always inward, physically and mentally, in the performance score and technical execution. Perhaps this is why it is a solo for a body. The work is insular and isolated, with the exterior being a secondary effect. They leave the room one after the other as if they were one role fractionated by three over time. The word solipsism comes to mind; it has a rolling, circular feel to it too.

FVEY: UPSTREAM DATA COLLECTIVE [digital and Otakaro River] by Sara Cowdell

Five Eyes (FVEY) is the espionage alliance between New Zealand, Canada, United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom that has been a source of controversy since Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013, when it became public knowledge that countries were spying on their own citizens.

Sara flips the surveilling back on the Five Eyes for this site specific performance with an accompanying audio critique (via headphones) and video displayed in the festival lounge. She kayaks the Avon River upstream with digital cameras capturing herself and the area she paddles through. ‘Upstream’ is also a term the Five Eyes use for direct data collection from civilians; information is gathered by colluding with offshore internet providers and local filtering of data flow in internet cables and switches.

In watching her live you may be within shot of the cameras onboard as the five flags parade around the windy river. During the Mihi Whakatau of the Festival she said this project heightened her awareness of surveillance equipment which drew all of our attention to the number of cameras simply within the Festival Lounge.

Whistleblowers, the civic meetings such as the GCSB talk Kim Dotcom headed in 2013 (what I was reminded of during this performance), and performance art like this draw attention to these covert, lawless operations, and the deliberate abuse of power.

1pm Intersectional Performance in Aotearoa, Panel discussion with Juanita Hepi and guests

Juanita opened the talk with lengthy introductions from the artists’ impressive bios as she reasons this panel discussion is here to give more space to the voices generally pushed to the margins. Even still, Mahina-Ina Kingi Kaui, Byllie-Jean Zeta, and Nathan Joe are heavy hitters, excelling in their field.

Mahina introduced herself with a nose flute and a saying that has stuck with me, “the sweetest sound comes from the nose.” She also played the Hine Raukatauri, named after the goddess who chose to live in the eponymous flute because she loved it so much. When Mahina played it in different orientations (once noticeably against her face) I could see among the spiritual aspects, how the felt physical vibrations contribute to the source of well-being and healing attributed to this instrument.

Juanita and Nathan talked about Intersectionality as a classist term that only some artists have the privilege of using. Byllie-Jean Zeta interpreted it in terms of Te Ao Maori drawing from the imagery evoked by intersections as a weaving, this weaving being of whakapapa, whakapapa in the broader understanding which includes the land, so to silence/ignore wahine voices who give life from the womb and continue whakapapa, is to silence/ignore the land.

Nathan spoke about how he came to finally embrace his intersectional story, finding a confessional style. It somewhat tipped to the other side of what his younger self was avoiding; to be put in a box by making conspicuously European work. What was interesting was the unshakeable theme of desire in his playwriting, he just didn’t know it at the time as a desire to connect to himself.

Juanita thanked Julia (Harvie) and Virgina (Kennard) for programming the artists and the intersectional panel as it shows the festival’s commitment to propping up intersectional voices in. Events like these make me feel hopeful for this city’s identity in a transitional shift from the dominant cultural narrative, the Anglican colonial history that is inherent in the name, Christchurch.

2.30pm Two Crones and a Desert by Robyn Jordaan

Robyn crafted an energetic journey. One that begins slowly. The jingles of the bell-mask set a mystical tone as the character floats about the stage twisting the egg timers, setting the performance in motion. The tick, tick, tick is the soundscape that introduces another bell-masked character, the second crone below the desert sky above, a projected image of orange hued cosmos on the impregnable screen.

Jordaan enters in the nude on all fours, weaving around the crones’ bipedal sways. It is when she dresses in a beige suit, and the two crones dress down, removing their mask, an intergenerational cast is displayed. Lilly-Mae Baird is in her late teens, Jordaan in her late twenties, and Mary Davison, early fifties. The three women glance, gesture, and move towards each other. There is a femininity in their dynamic which Mary departs to reach an animalistic state as Jordaan and Lilly-Mae find contact.

The tension from the first half is broken with a clever placement of sincerity. The three, overwhelmed or broken from their trancelike heights they reached prior to resting begin to laugh. The moment is effective in its honesty. They laugh with and at each other, dispelling their past dances and conveying into the room a time shared in rehearsals, allowing us insight into their true collective dynamic and encouraging us to take a step back and not treat everything in this black box with seriousness and reverence. The laughter is infectious and it feeds on itself. Jordaan gives a sensuous solo before her younger and older counterparts collect her, creating a new tension, and screams that become part of a vocal score that they fade out with the lights.

There is something unsettling about the relationships between the three characters. Desert-hued suit and masked figures are personifications that could well belong to an eerie cinematic world that the name also suggests.

In sequence the egg timers go off.

4pm Wild Fabrics by Antonia Barnett-McIntosh

Wild Fabrics is a film that begins with cityscapes, urban gardens, abandoned sites, and graffiti, captured with a touristic gaze. Steady hands and slow pans like one’s eyes would when people-watching in a new place. I suspect, in Antonia’s case, a contemporary composer with an ear for/on everything, she’s used this time indoors to listen for the musicality of her itinerant life she captured before lockdown. Travel seems so far away to all of us, the images become content to look at from a distance, literally but also contextually. I think this is why the work is called Wild Fabrics. 

The film jumps from travel log to screen-recorded typed text and then back to travel log. The travel log is decontextualized enough for us to people/site watch (and listen) with Antonia almost objectively. There’s musicality in the editing of the quotidian scenes and strategic blank space (seconds of looking at an empty screen between shots) and silence for pauses and reset. The typed text works in a way that intercepts the film’s flow. In a similar way this middle section eludes interpretation as sentences and statements trail off or segue before ever reaching a point. Antonia’s voice is layered over the text. There is a discrepancy between voice and typing, both chase each other in an attempt to transcribe or relay lofty information. Before long we are listening to the composition of colloquial speech with a backing track or percussion or ASMR of typing. When we’re back to the travel log we’re on the plane, looking at the sky, clouds, returning home, it seems. The song here is of being alone, which is the sound of the everyday white noise, some more relaxing than the others e.g. engine rumble of a plane vs. wind against leaves rustling in a bush. A brief ending. The subject is back on Antonia, alone again, reminding us of her isolation. She addresses the viewer directly, in the form of a personal email, typing “I miss you” and wishing us the best for the festival. Sincerity again, like Robyn’s, dissolving distance between audience and author in a delightful, modally-dynamic way.

5.30pm Notes on Migration by Hester Ullyart ft. Admiral Drowsy

Admiral Drowsy, wielding a guitar, sets up with his gadgets by his desk. A picture… Does it say, ‘Tea 3-5pm’? Travel ephemera strewn in front of him, including the Notes on Migration chapbook, the complete text of the show that Hester will read from, some books, mug, driftwood, anachronistic suitcases.

Hester enters in a striking jacket. Steven believes it is of the Dior New look 50’s silhouette. Style. The jacket is just foreshadowing. Hester’s impressive spoken word drives forward with smooth delivery, punch, and finesse. The show was packed with the stuff. I kind of just buckled in and went for the ride.

It ran as a brief memoir. Admiral Drowsy textured the travel with ambient guitar, and diegetic sounds of Hester’s imagery. The lighting was brilliant too. I was honestly surprised given the one hour allotted time we had to tech. The two performers seem to riff off each other which gave off more of a gig energy in the theatrical space, which I appreciated. She’d cast a string of words and then land one right on the beginning of a new musical bar I had no idea was coming. Nearing the end of the performance, intonation at the end of a line was tweaked slightly and held as though she were nearly singing (she had already sung by this point, halfway through the performance).

There was a particularly dramatic scene on the plane. I thought about style and delivery as a counterpoint to the content. Of course flying can be tense but the visceral sensations I was getting from the build of the sound and Hester’s verve conflicted with my understanding of the text, or my grasp of the situation seemed hyperbolized. Perhaps this is a testament to Hester’s virtuosity as a performance poet that at times the content was overshadowed by her delivery.

7pm Whare by Toi Aamai

By this point in the festival I’m pretty spent. I can feel concentration slipping. So I take a power nap with some friends, in a corridor beside the green room. When I awake, I drift from one dream state to the next, ten minutes late to Whare which is atmospherically dreamy. The characters are meticulously developed and unique but inhabit and interact in a state that I can only vaguely describe as flux. It’s uncertain whether what I’m watching here is to be taken at face value. I see a family that come to the aid of each other, entertain, sing, joke, but also seem lost or caught up within their own reality. One ghost-like character, face covered, donning two sun hats, an axe, and draped with layers of fabrics just seems to float about—really, like a table hockey puck, gliding across the stage, off stage, and to the very edges where light fittings are. I saw him enter the green room, lie down (I swear, still in character) then walk back out to get back on stage, that’s how I knew I was late for the show! Similarly, another character wearing a luchador mask (does this suggest some sort of globally imploded dystopic future?) shuffles along, traversing the stage beyond the set, which centres around an ill mother and nursing child, clicking and whistling scattered notes. The actors seem to embody these fully fledged characters ‘til they have an etheric quality. A koro is not quite resting, conversing, singing, going to work. His bilingual lyricism and muttering, te reo Māori and English, landing the surreal back into reality. That this world is not too far from ours. It is not prophetic but rather highlights the present and preexisting social hardships that tangata whenua face on their own land and the impacts of globalism and capitalism that came in tandem soon after colonisation.

It’s haunting or they are haunted yet beauty is found in the tender interactions between the family, even the bickering. The apparitions tend to drift off and out but always return home.

8.30pm Extanz Volume I: An Epic on Power by Katrina Bastian

The show critiques power structures inherent in dance and live performance, which of course can be a microcosm or product of larger forces we might draw from the show. As modern dance departed from Ballet in the 20th century residual patterns of power remained that continue to haunt contemporary dance today.

Dance sequences and past experiences (dance tribulations and trauma) between Katrina and Olivia McGregor are quoted on screen and in performance. This work seeks to exhaust form and subsequently Liv who’s dancing live, but there are measures in place to keep her grounded and in control. She calls pause at one point which flips the perceived relation of power to the screen which is a pre-recorded film. A working ethic that practices what it preaches is reflected in the show. We see Liv’s voice honoured in text besides Katrina’s. She seems in her power rather than succumbing to exterior force that is referenced by Katrina’s gimp suit and whistle. The play is in the choreographer/dancer relationship.

As I was watching Liv move with biographical movement and text I thought about Jerome Bel’s Veronique Doisneau (who’s also quoted in the work), who the eponymous soloist is given the spotlight after working in the Paris Opera Ballet as a chorus dancer. Extanz takes one step further, or a postmodern one, to reflect on its own structure and Katrina’s directorial position.

While physical ability is put to the test accessibility and ableism is also considered. I think about how my hearing self misses Ella’s signed communication. Not out of will or forcibly exerting power but by simply taking hearing for granted (a position of privilege) I continue a cycle of exclusion.

As I hear my friend sniffling next to me, Liv dancing her heart out, I remember Miguel Guiteirrez talking about believing in dance like believing in UFOs. He’s an artist that has been disillusioned with dance, arts markets, and the touring circuit so many times he has to keep tugging the rug from underneath himself in every show. One aspect of the show contends with what compels a contemporary dancer to dance? In the finale this is either superseded, answered, or diverted with another question of what compels Liv to dance.

DAY TWO

10am This Piece Won’t Change the World by Benedikte and Matthew Onarheim-Smith, with Martyn Roberts

Benedikte and Mathew present at this awkward time in the festival—10am on a Sunday, streets quiet, morning sun abrasive to the black box—with an equally awkward introduction. One of the last to creep in, the weight of my steps cause the clunky risers to creak as Bene and Matt adjust themselves on chairs. Matt moves to the back of his chair, standing, and affects an operatic voice to address the viewers. Again, abrasive, but then self-aware, noting the time of day, sarcastic, acknowledging the “millions” that streamed in, and assuring us, “don’t worry, we’re professionals. We know what we’re doing.” The show tumbles from there in a freely associative way, the show seems to be created through improvisation but the scenes are set. This creates this sort of dynamic that I feel is idiosyncratic to the duo. They’re like the audience’s young mum and dad for a moment, dorky, embarrassing, but then win you over with self-awareness, assured capability, and unpredictability.

They settle into the performance with curious texts, characters, abstraction, sincerity, and irony and soon the curtains close to remove the outside light. Their lighting designer joins them making further adjustments to the lighting state. Matt busies himself too while Bene addresses us, distractedly. This piece won’t change the world is on the brink of falling apart. It is kept together by careful craft, teetering on a tightrope. They work this idea as a consistent theme bickering with each other and breaking the fourth wall to question where this is going and questioning whether things are landing. They tag in and out to complete the performance before Bene confesses they don’t have an end. It ends abruptly in a considered anti-climactic way and we laugh and applaud for their creative wit.

1pm Jim’s Room by Mahi Mahi

Hōhepa Waitoa performs Jim’s Room, a multidisciplinary story about Rangatahi, in particular Jim, from Ōtautahi. At the festival’s Mihi Whakatau he said his show addresses the topic of suicide but in line with Te Ao Māori, he embraces the dark and the light. That this is also a story of friendship, family, and love. His personality exudes with humour. Before long he had us singing along to an Uncle Bob medley, an excerpt of the work, “don’t worry about a thing because every little thing is going to be alright,” which made me settle in at the beginning of the festival.

Hōhepa switches between a variety of characters one of them being Jim, ‘the golden child’ that is the butt of all the jokes and teasing between the brothers. Jim falls victim to suicide and we’re left to wonder why. There is bullying but in an heart-wrenching obituary scene poverty is also reason raised as one of his friends at the podium contends with this unpredictable event, feeling hurt and mad to have not been let into what was eating at Jim. But I’m jumping ahead. Previously, we’re given vignettes into their tikanga Māori upbringing with a funny anecdote about why he was given the dud name, “all the best names were taken already”, and his koro explaining that his name means, “Jim in Māori,” as he chuckles away. The brothers at the end broach the subject of tikanga, whether it is enough if it couldn’t lift Jim from depression though it is revealed in a monologue he experiences a ‘nothingness’ that is feeling removed from a source of vitality, Te Ao (light) and Te Pō (darkness). Was it the pressure he felt to fulfill a role when “he just always wanted to be Jim”? Without a definitive answer, as there commonly isn’t, we’re left reflecting on the personal history Hōhepa has left us with, and the harsh reality of our suicide rates in Aotearoa, particularly for young tāne. The production brings these stories forward to talk about this subject, for rangatahi to talk about it, and for social change.

The show is emotional and charged with haka, poetry, waiata, and the conflicting lyrics we sung along to… “don’t worry about a thing because every little thing is going to be alright.”

2.30pm First Buzzard at the Body by Elliot Vaughan

I applaud Tiny Fest’s curation. It is forgiving in the thirty minute changeover period to move from the sombre note Hōhepa left us with to Elliot’s formal reset.

He begins the show rattling off a rhythmic avian themed poem and then continuously repeating the line, “first buzzard at the body.” It’s an obscure title that had less of a mantric quality and more so repeated like a catchy sample. Pauses for breath and a slip of the lips so that we fleetingly catch, “first bastard at the party,” are hilarious moments. He closes his oral cavity, swallowing the line until it becomes a beatbox beat into the microphone, which is looped. First buzzard at the body seems to be the first line in an extended poem he rattles off to the beat.

Elliot alters the sounds and information we hear from the steady release of the poem by way of analogue and digital technology. To him, everything is a technology to exhaust, eking everything he can from the medium before moving on to something else: the mouth (speech, song, spoken word), lips, hands (clicks, slaps, claps), body (stamps, dance), microphone, tape recorder, audio cassette, the magnetic tape in the audio cassette, hand jingle bells, loop pedal, feedback from speakers. Things morph, amplify, distort in delightfully unexpected ways in a chain reaction of events meticulously mapped out like a more virtuosic Water Walk by John Cage or as Nathan described in the foyer afterward, a Rube Goldberg contraption. The ingenuity is hilarious.

Text also fills the screen above filling in more blanks from the poem. Is it the same poem? The loop pedal and body percussion is used to stand in for words, once looped and layered over each other, random facts about birds are shared: Owls eyes are ovular, which is why they can’t move in the socket; Turkey Vulture’s pee acidic pee down their legs to cool down and kill bacteria. Recurring images of and the words ‘Turkey Vulture’ become a meme—never thought memes projected in a live performance could be done so tastefully!

Elliot concludes with a soulful finale that dissolves into a gentle, sensual ending. Lovely.

4pm Back to Square One? by Anders Falstie-Jensen ft. Salesi Le’ota

Great grandmother Inga’s performative surrogate, Anders Falstie-Jensen, who’s surrogate is Salesi Le’ota, guest actor, shone in moments where his personality would spill out, as an aside, quip, or retort to a heckler. There are effectively three voices at play but Inga is our main storyteller. Le’ota does a wonderful job of transforming the theatre into the loving, hospitable home of Inga’s.

We’re asked to write our names in chalk on the tarkett with a protective bubble around it. These become the roots of knowledge to a tree of life that grows from a renewed earth. This is from a bedtime story, Norwegian lore, that Inga recounts. It’s about Rodin, Thor, and a death dragon, and the earth that prevails. What is the meaning of this story? She doesn’t know, appears not to, or doesn’t want to give it away… In any case the children always fall asleep before it ends. And like this story there is no solid point to hit home, we’re with the tangential mind of a pensive great grandmother in lockdown speaking to us conversationally, rhetorically, or to herself. We make what we will from the elder’s contemplations, a voice we don’t typically hear in theatres and in experimental live performance festivals like Tiny Fest. Images of her at home ground this play to reality.

It reminds me of where storytelling all begins, at the grandparents, on a lap, getting told a story in bed, drifting to sleep, seeping into the dreams, and shaping us into the beings we are today. Inga, however isolated, has imparted Anders with enough to ruminate over, enough to create this show which we in turn reflect on.

…Sometimes stories are just to serve conversation. “Kosta, tell me a story,” my papou would say. Honestly, I wasn’t that good at telling stories but I guess I’m making up for it in my later years. I left the Town Hall to warm up and prepare for my show with Josie and Steven.

In summation, exhausting, which feels too obvious to share. Like, of course, but also, this is what characterizes Tiny or should, in my opinion. Do the Tiny challenge next year, get a festival pass and try see every show. Get exhausted and become part of that committed crowd that coalesce at the festival, hanging out in the break periods. What I would have loved to have captured were these conversations in between shows because this is the immediate effect of the festival which, if transcribed, would lend itself quite nicely to the review form. Small festivals like Tiny will always have that collegial support and feeling that adds to the festival identity.

I don’t take seeing live shows for granted anymore and the line-up was too great to miss. Perhaps I’m writing for those of you that had FOMO. Thank you immensely to Tiny Fest (Julia, Virgina, and Jen) for being a live art festival in Ōtautahi. I hope you’re here to stay, grow (Medium fest lol), and nurture the local creative community.

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