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Emerging from the darkened stage’s primeval mist the imposing, noble figure of Sean McDonald, technically a towering dancer, appeared. His initial solo of majestic power and profound longing eloquently depicted the god Ranginui, the separated Sky father. His tender duet, developed as the work progressed, unfolded his love story with Earth... Keep Reading
Five dancers, three distinct choreographers, four visions, and a final work interwoven with contributions from five movement collaborators, all impacted by the potent force of COVID’s lockdown. The pandemic either prevented sufficient joint rehearsals on the one hand or permitted longer gestation of works pregnant with artistic possibilities... Keep Reading
Royal New Zealand Ballet delivered with a spirited performance of Giselle during an Autumnal tour, their sixth instalment of the ballet staple. First performed in 1841 Paris, the universal themes of Giselle are as relatable today as they were back in the great romantic era. Palpable tension between the ruling elite and lower classes, paired... Keep Reading
What a thrilling show to watch! The Royal Family Dance Crew toured the South Island for the first time including a performance at the Town Hall in Dunedin on Wednesday 5th May. The theatre was packed with a wide age range of fans of Parris Goebel and her Royal Family Dance Crew, who watched the show with awe and screamed with excitement... Keep Reading
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
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
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