Dance review: 'The Kiss Inside'

The Kiss Inside by NZ choreographer Douglas Wright. Photo / John Savage

What: The Kiss Inside, by Douglas Wright
Where: Sky City Theatre, April 16-17
Reviewer: Bernadette Rae

While punters in the casino below pursued the elusive ecstasy of winning against all odds, Douglas Wright flashed a theatrical trump card upstairs in the premiere of his new dance theatre work, performing a solo unannounced, unexpected and riveting and reminding us of what a galactic talent he has been from the beginning: intense as dark matter, wild and bright as an exploding sun.

He is orbited now by a company of superb dancers. Sarah-Jayne Howard, Craig Bary, Luke Hanna, Simone Lapka and Tara Jade Samaya embody Wright's aesthetic to fiery perfection.

The Kiss Inside, an exposition on the primal search for ecstasy, finds him in a new frame of mind though, with an underlying wryness to his observations, anger mitigated, the passion wiser.

An inverted tree dresses the stage. In the opening scene Hanna is also suspended upside down to deliver, in fine voice, ancient and beautiful karakia and waita. This unification of the Tarot's imagery and Maori wisdom is not the only cross-cultural reference.

Daphne Walker's rendition of When My Wahine does the Poi features a figure in full hijab failing to master the poi, enigmatically and irrepressibly funny. Flashes of humour pierce and punctuate the work throughout.

Chicken squawks and the squawks of cheap enlightenment seekers, and some monkey business with oranges at half time leaven without diminishing the gut blows delivered elsewhere: dancer Craig Barry hones a knife to razor sharpness and appears to lick the cutting edge; a junkie mainlines; a probing spotlight briefly catches a man masturbating, a couple copulating, a brotherhood flagellating. There is a ritual bloodbath. And perpetual, unrequited seeking.

Religious rituals of prostrations and supplications segue into the babble of dogma and disappointment. A tribe of bookheads trip and fall over their own intellect. Even a gorgeous duet of karma sutra like entwinings and mergings leads to a blinding by love.

In the final moments a naked male figure, Hanna again, bent over to support a stack of books on his back, and hobbled by curious and hugely clumsy footwear, makes his weary way across the stage.

But Wright, a voracious reader, has placed two moments of hope for a transcendent ecstasy in this Kiss Inside. One comes in the image of a girl, arms outstretched, spinning serenely into her own centre, the other in the long stillness of being, which concludes Howard's war-torn solo of grief.