Well schooled women give Pacific precision
Deirdre Tarrant14/09/2011 11:34:00 a.m.
Black Grace Verse 2 Opera House Monday 12 September 2011, Reviewed by Deirdre Tarrant
Black Grace has changed - significantly. From an all-male company with a strong cultural context the works on stage now were danced mainly by the feisty and exceedingly well schooled women of the company and were very movement based.
The inspiration that choreographer/director Neil Ieremia draws from is still his personal life and the journey he has come on.
PatiPati, the opening work, reached back to the early works of the company and drew on the body percussion and traditional influences of Samoan Sasa and Fa’ataupati as well as acknowledging material from works made across a time span from 1995-2007.
Ieremia made a work for the graduating class of Unitec last year and it also had these elements and the same exuberance and energy of shifting and intricate rhythms and bodies seamlessly changing positions as the sands of time. The company dancers were joined for PatiPati by students of the New Zealand School of Dance and together they opened the evening with precision and a real sense of the Pacific.
The following four offerings were sections of larger, earlier works by Ieremia and were danced by the company; Verses, The Nature of Things and Keep Honour Bright. The programme does not credit the dancers in the works and I do not know them well enough to name them, but there was a wonderful trio of girls who seemed to be onstage and dancing for the entire evening.
The movement vocabulary is relentless and repetitive with bursts of angular energy and the sinuous flow of flying bodies dominant throughout. They can dance but amongst the fragments of frenzy and free fall the emotional and theatrical side of performance seemed to have been missed? The poems and words that generated the dance were spoken but their relationship to the movement that followed seemed rather tenuous.
Natalia Mann on the harp was magical but the physical response to this beauty seemed to be more of the same, phrases and relationships that searched but found no calm amid the gestures and the ritual of grouping and regrouping.
Perhaps this in itself is a statement about life and the dancers work their hearts out to deliver fast paced conversations of dance as though time is running out, often entering and leaving the stage space at full speed.
It is great to see the company here in Wellington and to savour this visit from an Auckland based arts organisation that spends a significant part of their time travelling overseas and being ambassadors for our country. It was good to take time to see ‘The View’.
Black Grace has changed - significantly. From an all-male company with a strong cultural context the works on stage now were danced mainly by the feisty and exceedingly well schooled women of the company and were very movement based.
The inspiration that choreographer/director Neil Ieremia draws from is still his personal life and the journey he has come on.
PatiPati, the opening work, reached back to the early works of the company and drew on the body percussion and traditional influences of Samoan Sasa and Fa’ataupati as well as acknowledging material from works made across a time span from 1995-2007.
Ieremia made a work for the graduating class of Unitec last year and it also had these elements and the same exuberance and energy of shifting and intricate rhythms and bodies seamlessly changing positions as the sands of time. The company dancers were joined for PatiPati by students of the New Zealand School of Dance and together they opened the evening with precision and a real sense of the Pacific.
The following four offerings were sections of larger, earlier works by Ieremia and were danced by the company; Verses, The Nature of Things and Keep Honour Bright. The programme does not credit the dancers in the works and I do not know them well enough to name them, but there was a wonderful trio of girls who seemed to be onstage and dancing for the entire evening.
The movement vocabulary is relentless and repetitive with bursts of angular energy and the sinuous flow of flying bodies dominant throughout. They can dance but amongst the fragments of frenzy and free fall the emotional and theatrical side of performance seemed to have been missed? The poems and words that generated the dance were spoken but their relationship to the movement that followed seemed rather tenuous.
Natalia Mann on the harp was magical but the physical response to this beauty seemed to be more of the same, phrases and relationships that searched but found no calm amid the gestures and the ritual of grouping and regrouping.
Perhaps this in itself is a statement about life and the dancers work their hearts out to deliver fast paced conversations of dance as though time is running out, often entering and leaving the stage space at full speed.
It is great to see the company here in Wellington and to savour this visit from an Auckland based arts organisation that spends a significant part of their time travelling overseas and being ambassadors for our country. It was good to take time to see ‘The View’.
