Using the online platform Twitch TV via the Unitec Dance channel, this showcase was comprised of karakia, introductions, and six works in succession, with a couple of well-timed breaks. A poignant address and honouring of the challenging relocation of the Unitec contemporary dance programme and the soon to be demolished, well-loved dance studios off Carrington Road, to make way for DEVELOPMENT. Thanks colonial capitalism, not. So, due to covid related lockdowns this event is considered as a ‘SHOWCASE of films in lieu of a live event’. 

For anyone who missed it, the films will remain online on demand for a number of days. 

Before I begin, an apology/disclaimer: due to shit satellite internet where I live, what I have witnessed tonight of this show is partial. My experience has been predominantly of the spinning wheel of doom, with short patchy bits of the works, in glitches, freezes, flickers of movement, and slight cracks of sound tracks. Attuning to the live streaming, I added more devices of varying sizes to increase my chances of seeing the material, working to en-joy the delay of stops and starts. Peripheral information became a vitalising component of my viewing, alongside my note-taking and drawing, where comments and live view numbers occupied my thoughts, intermingling with the images, movements, and memories.

1. 1.     Weathering 21, by Y1 students with Claire O’Neil. 

Compiling 17 different cameras in 17 locations, and, it is the weathering that draws my critical attention. I see the sun on sand; wind on loose-dance-pants; the voice of rain and grass. Dancers in environments, with views, surfaces and clouds that dilate and contract in frame, becoming important elements and actants of the work. Capturing the feel of covid zoom life, this piece sets the feel for the rest of the programme. A contextual situated feels. I settle into the mood of glimpsing people and the places in which you-we dwell. Pondering the ways we find to meet and mingle in dance from a distance. “Neat.” “Go Lara!!!”

1. 2.     Practising Togetherness, Y2 students with Tamsyn Russell (DOP Paul Young, Editor Jessie McCall).

 A quick-draw precision drawing-moving, in lines, colour, and polished wooden floors. What feels like a black-box theatre, it is a gym I am told. Blue, green, crimson, and mandarin. There is flossing and fisties. To make TaLL. “so lush.” Love heart emojis and black masks, the new normies. I’m yearning for that trailing seaweed hand and a line up. One by one. So familiar. So felt.

I watch the clock in count down during the break. An auto-shifting of stunning photos by Jinki Cambronero. I sip cider sadly whilst faces, attached to their humans, some shirtless, some sweaty, are read as DANCER. So familiar. So felt.

1. 3.     If It’s The Last, directed by Tianyi Liu with three Unitec/Beijing Dance Academy students (filmed in Shanghai, project facilitation Yiling Chen). 

A domestic setting, with replicating bodies, sequencing actions, and movements. Through hallway, bedroom, bathroom, we witness the mundane acts of brushing teeth, lying on couch, sleeping in bed. Each amplified to another place, another estranged feeling. In loop, there is time to sense the shifts and accumulations. The Clicking and Ticking, a passing of time to emphasise a circular sense of lockdown days and night. Cake, fork, eat, repeat. “Beautifully shot.” “And edited”, I add.

1. 4.     Turned Out I Was Everyone, Y3 with Jessie McCall (Choreographer) and Courtney Rodgers (Cinematographer).

“oooo” “!!!!” “exciting.” I try to count the star eye emojis, but I’m too slow for the chat speed. Sneakers with socks (Terpsichore-esque in aesthetic), I am shot back to the Unitec library, and the cover of the first dance book I ever read.[1] Performers in leotards and glistening see-through face masks; numbers pinned to their chests. I’m definitely feeling the gymnasium now, I am very gymnastics and ready to tumble-with. Clean hair, freshly brushed. I am just blown away by the dancers at this point, searching clapping hands emoji, but this work is something else. Something more-than its understated re-use of the theatrical tools as dancer props. It is conjuring something beyond a “bittersweet finale”.

1. 5.     Decades of Tragedies and Triumphs, with Aloalii Tapu and Joshua Faleatua. 

An epic 47 minutes of solo works, in connected parts, that tend to each of the Year 3 students as independent artists, yet such intricately entangled beings. Bodily beasts of burden and delight. Such sensitive work to hold space for every emergent voice, whilst also shaping-lighting-threading-editing of a necessary togetherness. The blackened space around and beyond the dancer indicates an immanent loss and unknowing, the acknowledgement of the departing, receding space and the structures that have held Unitec’s contemporary dance programme in place. Yet, there is humour too, such as with “hairrrbaloonies”, then, a sci fi eerie scene, … , and a strange en-tinselled monologue. Each part throws us somehow off kilter. We are unsettled, and whilst feeling a nearing end, this film manages to honour the dedication, dreams and doubts across ‘decades’, making palpable the sweaty (often extreme) hard work and emotional impact of all our time spent in dance together in those damn fine studios. 

1. 6.     To The Forest, To The Island, Sarah Foster-Sproull with Year 3 dancers (Director/editor Andrew Foster, Music Eden Mulholland). 

   “Floaty” and “flirty”. This is a poetic and emotional work, and initially I’m taken in by the pastel suits and languid movement in dresses. Another homage to the Unitec dance studios, we are led to believe this the very last work to be created in those spaces. Yet, I find myself feeling kind of ripped off as it dawns on me watching this last work of the showcase, that everyone involved has had the opportunity to process this significant loss. And here I am on the end of a glitching bloody livestream trying to come to terms with what this means?! I am left wondering who will be the last to step foot in there, the last bum roll or high kick, the last one to run and slide face down, to stroke those floors in ‘warm up’ mode? Will the final closing of the windows, or of that middle door, be ritualised? As the performance film continues, I am haunted by this questioning, descending into more intense ponders – is dance dead? Dying? (Or just exhausted as Lepecki tells us?) 

   To The Forest, To The Island feels like a meditation on the bigger issue of dance training after lockdowns, considering what will become of dance and the performing arts after …? A fitting culmination to the programme – in a momentary pause between the glitching flickers of my viewing experience, a freeze, the light in this pause blows out the entire image, like the blinding flash light of an atomic detonation. Somehow, in this obliterative moment of nuclear devastation, I am left with a glimmer of hope. I want to believe this is how the work ended, as it was deeply affecting for me, almost shocking to the bone (in a good way), yet I cannot know how those dancers actually walked off the stage. Or how they walked out of that studio to do whatever they do next, to unwind and recharge post performance. And that is precisely the non-ending ending that will continue to tease and please.  

   A huge thank you to the entire team for this massive effort, a beautiful and heart wrenching sharing in these difficult times. And a special thank you to Paul Young for inviting me to write this reflection, with huge respect for all you have done for the course and the students. 

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