On the 8th of April in Tāmaki Makaurau, after a year-long skirmish with pandemic cancellations and postponements, Aotearoa’s newest ballet company made their debut. In Subtle Dances, co-presented with the Auckland Arts Festival, BalletCollective Aotearoa offered a triple bill of new work by three Pākeha New Zealand choreographers, with... Keep Reading
Chamber Music New Zealand has boldly incorporated a theatre element into their national tour, Transfigured Night, by commissioning leading ballet choreographer Loughlan Prior to choreograph the entire programme. The New Zealand String Quartet—Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola) and Rolf Gjelsten (cello)—joined by... Keep Reading
Another triumph of ChoreoCo, the annual project of fresh, innovative choreography and Experimental Dance! This year, five highly trained, and particularly disciplined exponents of contemporary technique, were young, versatile dancers who presented myriad visual questions. The audience at that NZ Fringe Festival performance, which was... Keep Reading
The Noy family’s programme notes began with written greetings in Spanish, Hebrew, Te Reo and Hawaiian. Before the Dance performance began this immigrant family’s imported linguistic cultural wealth was interwoven with a respectful spoken address acknowledging the indigenous Maori ancestral claimants to the land on which the performance... Keep Reading
Accepting the challenge of a Fringe Festival performance, Otto Kosok conceived and choreographed a thought provoking work of immediate contradictions, baffling premise and dark menacing execution. Against a seemingly pointless existence, humans imbued with genius and courage manoeuvred to survive and triumph. Keep Reading
With an informed sensibility, EDWA2020 gently debuts the rich potential that experimental performance practice has to offer in Aotearoa. How do you translate a global perspective into a local one? How do you speed backwards to explain a milieu lengthily observed? Building the festival from scratch two years ago, the second iteration of... Keep Reading
Footnote New Zealand Dance UNDERCURRENT Aurora Centre, Burnside High School, Christchurch, 10 November 2020 Reviewed by Robyn Jordaan Footnote’s UNDERCURRENT is a full 360. Closing 2020 and Footnote’s 35th year, the premiere of UNDERCURRENT presents two astounding choreographic works by Kota Yamazaki and Rose Philpott, featuring an... Keep Reading
The Royal New Zealand Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty. The Opera House, Wellington 29 October 2020 Reviewed by Mona Williams “Art is an act of defiance.” Thus, from pandemic dictated restrictions has emerged RNZB’s production of The Sleeping Beauty. To experience this elegant but deadly struggle between Love and Hate, Generosity and... Keep Reading
Figuring out how to use Social Media as a creative or company owner can be quite tricky, like knowing when to post, trends, and other complicated technological stuff. But don’t worry, I’m here to give you a few quick hacks to help present yourself or your business on Social Media… and possibly get more followers. In this blog, I’m... Keep Reading
DANZ
Award-winning community dance artist Nicholas Rowe journeys through seven cities to explore how very diverse dancers respond to their urban landscapes. Filmed in Laos, Fiji, Lebanon, Italy, Palestine, Finland and Australia, this dance film weaves performances from marginalized community groups, to question how creating dances together can... Keep Reading
Self-isolation has been hard. Art can help everyone. Artist in Residence is an immersive podcast series made in collaboration with ten New Zealand artists across theatre, music, poetry and dance. Each artist has made you a 15-minute personalised performance to help with one thing you might be feeling in isolation and as we transition... Keep Reading
Self-isolation is hard. Art can help everyone. Artist in Residence is an immersive podcast series made in collaboration with ten New Zealand artists across theatre, music, poetry and dance. Each artist has made you a 15-minute personalised performance to help with one thing you might be feeling in isolation. Sarah Foster-Sproull is... Keep Reading
New Dance Group ChoreCo / Footnote New Zealand Dance New Zealand Fringe Festival 10 March 2020 Circa Theatre Reviewed by Mona Williams Under the auspices of Footnote New Zealand Dance five selected freelance dancers, worked for three weeks with two talented choreographers, Josie Archer and Kosta Bogoievski to mount a spirited, richly... Keep Reading
Choreographer/dancer Lucy Marinkovich and composer/saxophonist Lucien Johnson combined to produce Strasbourg 1518, a fusion of dance, music and story into theatre. Their take on that specific historic outbreak of dancing mania is given psychological and political context using tropes of religion, rationality, visual art and... Keep Reading
We make dances because we have bodies. We make dances to deal with our matter, to experience a particular feeling of body-joy, to enter into the idea of a knowledge that is immutable, and real, because it doesn’t know what any of those words mean. Insofar as the dancing-body exists, so too does the techno-body: the locus of seduction and... Keep Reading
