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*The views expressed in these articles are not necessarily those of DANZ or its Board of Directors.
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
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
Tutus on Tour Royal New Zealand Ballet Oamaru, Friday 13 March 2020 Reviewed by Sofia Keep Reading
French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj’s reading of Snow White, first created in 2008 for his company of twenty-six dancers, is a morality tale of vanity and obsession, which still resonates nearly twelve years later, mirroring as it does the narcissism of the present-day Trumpian era. Keep Reading
Hōkioi me te Vwōhali From spirit eagles land Ōkareka Dance Company and Exhale Dance Tribe in the NZ Festival of the Arts 2020 Reviewed by Arihia Latham As sound engulfed the audience and light flashed like the morning sun revealing itself behind rocks and trees, I felt my heart ruffling its feathers in my sternum. I was... Keep Reading
In Search of Dinozord by Studios Kabako Sat 29 Feb 2020 Reviewed by Sascha Perfect I feel ill equipped to write a review of a show when I know nothing about the history or culture of the artists involved. But I can thank the New Zealand Festival of the Arts for bringing a work that normally wouldn’t be seen on our shores. Presented at... Keep Reading
القُدس JERUSALEM MAU Concept / Direction / Design / Sound: Lemi Ponifasio Lighting: Helen Todd Choreography: Lemi Ponifasio and MAU Company The Opera House Wellington Saturday 22nd February How do we apologise to roses our feet trampled roses lying around the city’s eyelashes? Blocked roads books oozing... Keep Reading
How do you fly down a sand dune? Carried by momentum with the ground falling away beneath your feet – perhaps? Flying Down Sand Dunes is the second iteration of a heart-felt dance work. A group of accomplished recent graduates first presented this show at the 2019 Fringe Festival. That rendition was, in a simple reading, an exploration of... Keep Reading
Billed as “a thrilling collection of performances by young dancers on the brink of their professional careers”, the opening night of the Graduation Season 2019 did not disappoint. In the two-hour programme (plus two intervals) eight meaty works were presented, which each tested the young dancers’ performance and technical abilities and... Keep Reading
Infusing fresh vision, vibrancy and enjoyment into a well-known, gruesome folk tale, choreographer Loughlan Prior countered with a dizzying style palette; the 1920’s Charleston, a smooth waltz and flapper era vaudeville; he spiced it with can-can, chorus line routine, early Broadway sassy Jazz interpretations, and a sly, knowing touch of... Keep Reading
The ancient, high Art of the Bharatanatyam Dance tradition was richly expressed in a two-hour, evening interpretation of complex rhythmic and percussive sounds, expressive facial, body and hand movements; performance to music of voice, flute, sitar, ankle bells and tabla, and danced narratives of virtue, sacrifice, treachery, loyalty, magic,... Keep Reading
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