REVIEW
What: Choreographic Showcases 1, 2, 3
Where: Tapac, Tempo Dance Festival
Reviewer: Bernadette Rae
Three choreographic showcases, each showing three works by a variety of artists, is great fun.
It is an opportunity for choreographers to produce a short, new work with the dance festival taking responsibility for venue,
technical support and marketing - usually daunting aspects in the creative process of new dance.
So it is disappointing to find just a handful of people in the audience at the last performance of Choreographic Showcase 3 - and not a whole lot more during most other performances.
Could it be that even the committed enthusiast is a little jaded by the angst that overwhelmingly colours contemporary dance offerings? Is there is a limit to our interest in prolonged floor rolling and anguished torso twitching to sombre sounds, the finer meanings of which are as clear as unsalted porridge?
There was, inevitably, a good dollop of gloomy introversion in these showcase offerings.
So a huge cheer for Camille Sweney who shattered the mould with her hilarious Not What I Do, a down-on-the-farm spoof with music that included Fred Dagg songs - perfectly performed by Maria Munkowits, Megan Hughes and Rangi Rangitukunoa, cleverly clad in upside down shirts of rural plaid.
And good on Vicki Grimshaw for her Confessions of a Dance Whore, a slightly gauche presentation, but one which drew you deep into her journey.
Dancers Will Barling and Zoe Watkins were arrestingly beautiful in Ann Dewey's Paper Tiger, and Katie Burton's Tick, on the subject of "soul sucking" and inspired by the animal in the title, was leavened deliciously by the use of symbolic toilet plungers, live music and gorgeous costumes.
Two films were included. Pandora, by Alyx Duncan, is an enigmatic study with an excess of arty close-ups and very little dance.
International award-winning dance film creator Shona McCullough shows exactly how it should be done in Break, with beautiful faces, bodies, scenery and cinematic tricks magically enhancing the stupendous dance and presence of Ursula Robb, Thomas Kiwi and Arlo Gibson.
