Dance the night away

Hannah Sullivan has been watching how we dance - and has turned it into a funny and moving show. Photo/supplied

Hannah Sullivan has been collecting the dance moves of friends, family and complete strangers to create her first solo show.

Echo Beach is named for the hit song by Martha and the Muffins, a track the 12-year-old Sullivan saw her parents dancing to on New Year's Eve 1999, the first time she can recall seeing them dance together and she uses that memory as the starting point for the show.

"My parents' relationship was changing," she says, "and it helped me start to understand them through the way they were moving."

Although Sullivan has a degree in performance she is not a trained dancer but she doesn't see that as a disadvantage.

"Echo Beach is about the dancing that everyone does and if I was a brilliant dancer, it wouldn't be as relatable.

"I'm choreographing by referencing social moves or places where people dance. I'm interested in how dance can be an expression of intimacy and also that it's the way we attract people, the way we try and impress people. It can be very awkward too."

A visit to Mexico while she was devising Echo Beach gave Sullivan some unexpected insights. "There's a different attitude to dance there. It's a lot to do with sustaining of communities and people coming together regularly to dance and be close to one another.
That really excited me."

Music for Echo Beach has been carefully chosen. "The reaction that people have when a song that they know and love comes on is brilliant."

Although she uses other family moments, including her grandfather teaching her to waltz, Sullivan emphasises Echo Beach is not autobiographical.

"It's about the end of love. I talk about dancing as a way in which you can see something breaking - see a relationship that isn't working anymore. It's also about those first moments of love, the initial excitement of meeting on the dance floor."

the fine print
What: Echo Beach
Where: X-Space, Baycourt Theatre
When: 7.30pm on October 27 and 28
Tickets: from Baycourt or ticketek.co.nz (TECT discount applies until October 7).