DANZ
TSB Bank Arena
Wellington
27 September 2024
Executive Creative Director: Brian Burke
Show Director: Malia Johnston
Composer & Music Director: Eden Mulholland
Production Designer: Robin Rawstorne
Lighting Designer: Trudy Dalgleish
AV Designers: Drop the Spoon
Costume Designer: Gabrielle Stevenson
Reviewed by Brigitte Knight
Opening night for the 34th World of WearableArt’s awards show Dream Awake sees the Wellington waterfront awash with purple light, invigorated by a handful of beautifully costumed performers, photographers offering audience participation, and a full house filing into the TSB Bank Arena. From the arrival at the venue, through the transition into the saturated arena lighting, to the fresh geometric staging, Robin Rawstorne’s production design is the first indication that WOW Dream Awake will be a thoroughly cohesive and crisply integrated experience.
Having sold WOW in 2002 (to New Zealand company STILL), founders Dame Suzie Moncrieff and Heather Palmer remain involved as WOW Ambassadors, and Dame Suzie Moncrieff’s special award recognises the original WOW spirit of ingenuity and creativity. Long-standing WOW choreographer Malia Johnston is Show Director, and alongside Executive Creative Director Brian Burke the pair have successfully wrangled the at times unwieldy beast that is the WOW arena awards show into a deliberately curated and clearly focussed production. The two elements of the WOW showcase, the designs (designers, art works, competition coordinators, judging, and finalist selection in Nelson) and the production (the artistic team, production staff, and performers who create the stadium show in Wellington) both require sophisticated synchronicity to flourish, which has in some years been unbalanced. 2024’s Dream Awake replaces theatrical narrative with a generously loose yet accessible theme, ensuring important design elements such as costume have a clear purpose and point of view, and the designs and production are never in competition with one another.
The WOW design competition is made up of six categories; three recurring sections (Aotearoa, Avant-Garde, and Open), and three sections unique to the year (in 2024 these are Natural World, Geometric Abstraction, and Crazy Curiosities of the Creature Carnival). Dream Awake puts these categories front and centre, allowing each section its own colour palette, movement vocabulary, soundscape, and visual world. Staging and transitions between sections are swift and seamless, choreographic choices enhance the wearable art works, AV designs have some real successes (particularly when we are able to see the garments enlarged as they come to the fore onstage), and the overriding impression of the shows is stylised, deliberate, energised, and effervescent.
Populating the stage are a curated selection of performers particularly suited to Malia Johnston’s vivid sculptural choreographic and directive style, including aerialists, kapa haka performers, singers, roller skaters, two musicians, and of course a large ensemble of dancers who provide the basis of every scene, and the finesse to the show overall. WOW is one of the larger contract employers of dancers in Aotearoa, and collaborates with the New Zealand School of Dance annually casting first year students and providing them with valuable professional experience during their training. Although the live band onstage is no more, Eden Mulholland’s pre-recorded soundtrack retains a significant presence enlivened by fiddle player Shimna Higgins and multi-instrumentalist Dave Khan, and interspersed with live and recorded vocals by Sharn Te Pou as The Dreamer and Nikita Tu-Bryant as The Dream Maker. Occasional theatrical narration is essentially superfluous, but does serve as a restful break from the intensity of the composition, and Mulholland weaves in some familiar Kiwi classics, albeit in a rearranged and abstracted style. With Dream Awake Johnston and Burke activate the full height of the arena space throughout the show; an accomplishment in a stadium setting that helps the audience feel connected to the performance regardless of where they are seated. Occasionally transitions in and out of aerial equipment are exposed and disrupt the magic of their illusions, but these are very minor details and do not detract from the overall success of the show. Peppered throughout are sweet moments of intimacy ensuring WOW Dream Awake captivates regardless of proximity, such as the delightful Tabitha Dombroski emerging from an improbably small suitcase en pointe, the always-popular aerial skills of Rodney Bell, and the chic relaxed control of Te Pou in his magical cloud suit roller-skating backwards down the stage’s ramps and around its revolves.
With a new stage design, entrances through the audience, and the integration of AV elements, WOW’s heart – the wearable art designs – are more easily seen, appreciated, and somehow feel closer in 2024. Dancers and other performers support and enhance the showcased designs rather than competing with them, and the choice to costume ensembles uniformly in most of the sections is key to this success. With 112 invited finalist designers from around the world showcasing 90 designs ranging from the spectacular to the more familiar, there is something to inspire and interest every audience member. Purchasing a WOW Dream Awake 
programme is worthwhile to keep track of the enormous selection of garments, and to follow along with the awards and their recipients (programmes are now $30 each, which is a significant investment for many). Opening night is also Awards Night, and although the hour-long presentation feels quite long after a show without an intermission, it is always entertaining to discuss the judgements and compare favourites. Outwardly bombastic but underpinned with poignancy and connection, and taking out the 2024 Supreme WOW Award is Curves Ahead by United States designer Grace DuVal. The design, 7 years in the making, is inspired by “the juxtaposition between the natural landscape of Aotearoa and the neon signage and garb of New Zealand road crews following the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake…Curves Ahead leads the charge to rebuild what once was and what is yet to be”.
Upcoming WOW Dream Awake audiences can look forward to a spectacular show curated with skilled and comprehensive choreographic consideration and direction, greatly improved production technology and quality, and a riot of colour and design. WOW Dream Awake runs for a three-week season until Sunday 13 October 2024.
Photographs: Stephen A’Court and Andi Crown
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