The two big themes for this year's Living Room, which O'Reilly has curated with her husband Phil, are gender and dance combinations - dance combined with marching, with a bus, with BMX bikes, with a shop window, with fighting, with audience participation via headphones. The combinations make the works accessible (important for a publically funded art series, an "eccentric little festival," as O'Reilly calls it) but also make room for irony and comment.
It's pleasing that Josh Rutter's tongue-in-cheek presentation of social pressures and male identity Dance Like A Butterfly Dream, Boy is back at 8pm tonight, albeit without Rutter himself because, unfortunately, he was recently concussed while boxing (ironic in itself, given the title's reference to Mohammed Ali).
Another highlight, Boxed from Britain's Seven Sisters Group, looks at a different type of boxing. "Look, there's a girl in a box!" said one woman to her children last Sunday, as they passed the Smith & Caughey window on Queen St. No different from the usual department store display? Except that this girl, wearing cream shorts, and a matching Grecian-inspired apron, is alive and kicking inside her vertical wooden coffin. In silence, the dancer, Maria Munkowits, tries various ways to get out, dolphin-dives down the walls on her shoulders as if trying to get splinters, and ends by exaggerating supermodel poses until she is hunched over in grotesquely awkward position. But she also uses the walls, floor and ceiling for support and propulsion, as if the box was her tango partner.
This year, Living Room - now funded by the Waitemata Local Board with support from the British Council - is part of Art Week, hopefully a boost to both of these great initiatives.
White Nights Marching Girls perform today at 12.30pm and 7.20pm.
See artweekauckland.co.nz
