Whakaarua: Coming to Form

By Louise Potiki Bryant

Inspired by the whare tapere in her project 'Whakaahua: Coming to Form', the 2014 Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance Fellow, Louise Potiki Bryant, tells us how this came to life.

Whakaahua Dance is inspired by performances of the historical whare tapere (house of entertainment), whereby a quality, or aspect, of the natural world emerges from deep within a dancer to eventually find its fullest expression in the performance of the dance.

This project followed on from a collaboration spanning more than eight years with researcher and composer Professor Te Ahukaramu-Charles Royal. Over this time we have been holding wanaka (workshops) to develop new dance and haka based on Charles’s research into the whare tapere. Charles was interested in addressing the balance of feminine and masculine expression in haka and in seeing how a choreographer would utilise his research.

Read the full article (Iss. 37) Whakaahua: Coming to Form