FRESH (2014)
Q Theatre Loft, 305 Queen St, Auckland
09/10/2014 - 10/10/2014
Production Details
Thoughtful, compelling and fun, Fresh is Tempo’s platform for emerging choreographers and new dance works. This year features a brand new season of short dance works by choreographers Lizzie Hewitt, Perri Exeter, Kura Te Ua & Hawaiki Tu Productions, Lucy Marinkovich & Anita Hunziker and Paul Wilson & Kayla Paige.
For more information on the works see below and follow the links:
CUED IN
Choreographer Lizzie Hewitt
Company LiHDa Company (Lizzie Hewitt Dance)
Performers Lizzie Hewitt, Nicole Wilkie, Antonia Seidel, Emma Payton
Music Queens of The Stone Age – Burn The Witch. Nick Knox – own composition. Yann Tiersen – Further South.
With just under 200 signs, LiHDa Company invites you into the choreographic process. Each sign instructs the dancers to perform a particular movement/phrase at a different level, facing, speed, etc. Like a ‘movement’ orchestra, the conductor controls what occurs on stage in that moment, so each performance is entirely unique.
Lizzie Hewitt gained her BA (Hons) Dance Theatre from the Laban Conservatoire of Dance, London, in 2011. She has performed in Japan, UK, Melbourne and NZ. She won the 2012 Dunedin Fringe ‘Best Newcomer’, followed by a commission for The Space, Melbourne. Lizzie founded the LiHDa Company to expand the Ōtepoti dance scene.
LIFE! DEATH! PRIZES!
Choreographers Anita Hunziker & Lucy Marinkovich
Performers Rose Philpott & Lucy Marinkovich
Music Ceremony – New Order.
Life! Death! Prizes! is a choreographic manifesto reflecting on our mutual experiences of friendship, failure and gratification. Thedichotomies of falling down and holding yourself together are abstractly explored within this contemporary dance performance context. Anita and Lucy emphatically thank Rose for performing Anita’s role in the Tempo season.
Anita Hunziker and Lucy Marinkovich’s Life! Death! Prizes! is their first choreographic collaboration, performed at Tempo as an excerpt from the full-length show. Previously colleagues at Footnote Dance Company, both first trained at the New Zealand School of Dance. The Wellington-based pair are actively involved in the dance community as artists, teachers and choreographers.
RONGO
Choreographers Hawaiki TU
Company Hawaiki TU
Performers Beez Ngarino Watt, Karena Koria, Sophie Williams & Kura Te Ua Gibby Harris & Kura Te Ua
Music: Gibby Harris & Kura Te Ua
A short Haka Theatre (Dance) work that challenges us to reforge indigenous connections with the environment and each other. Inspired by ‘Rongo’ (Maori God of Agriculture and peace). ‘You reap what you sow’..
Kura Te Ua and Beez Ngarino Watt are the Co-Directors and Choreographers of Hawaiki TU, both experienced Kapa Haka exponents with a range of skills in dance and theatre.
SECTA
Choreographer Perri Exeter
Company Trip The Light
Performers Alex Sani, Rodney Tyrell, Renee Richards, Grace Pritchard, Xavier Breed, Kyle TeWhata & Caitie Thompson
Music Opera – Emmanuel Santarromana. Black Skinhead (instrumental) – Kanye West. Retrograde – James Blake
‘Secta’ is not about judging those who have chosen this life, but rather is an exploration of the interaction between people (particularly youth) within these organised groups. The challenging, strong and dynamic choreography delves into the complex emotions that people living within organised groups face on a daily basis. What would you give up in order to belong?
Perri Exeter, Unitec BPSA (Dance) 2008. Since graduating Perri has danced and choreographed for Triple 8 Funk Dance Crew, Yours Truly Productions, private sector dance studios and corporate companies, and also gained a Graduate Diploma of Teaching (secondary) 2009. Perri is the Teacher in Charge of Dance at Rutherford College for five years.
INPUT/OUTPUT
Choreographers Paul Edward Wilson & Kayla Paige
Company Out of the Box
Performers Paul Edward Wilson & Kayla Paige
Music The Dictator – Charlie Chaplin Speech. Personal Mix – Andrew Cesan
‘Input/Output,’ explores the idea of breaking free to reach our true potential. We are stuck in a rhythm, an illusion of our true existence as human beings. What is our true identity? Were we born into this world to be controlled and manipulated by fear and power, or do we have the potential to be something more than what we have been conditioned to believe?
Paul Edward Wilson and Kayla Paige have been dancing and performing for numerous years, exploring all dance genres. In previous years they have been a part of ‘Out of the Box’ productions analyzing aspects of human life, both physically and spiritually.
MEMORY HOUSE
Choreographer Loughlan Prior
Company Royal New Zealand Ballet
Performers Sir Jon Trimmer with Lucy Balfour, Abigail Boyle, Dimitri Kleioris, Loughlan Prior & Maree White
Music J S Bach, Franz Schubert, Francesca Mountfort
A short film featuring Sir Jon Trimmer and artists of The Royal New Zealand Ballet, Memory House is a combination of surreal circumstance and poignant dance relationships. “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things” – Cicero.
Loughlan Prior is an emerging choreographer with The Royal New Zealand Ballet, Loughlan joined the company in 2010 after graduating from The New Zealand School of Dance. Since then he has created a number of stage and film works for RNZB, iD Fashion Week, NZSD and The Asian Grand Prix. His love for cinema has also lead him to develop his talent as a dance film maker.
60 mins
Some fresher than others...
Review by Dr Linda Ashley 09th Oct 2014
Tempo provides a valuable platform for emerging choreographers with Fresh.
Some of the choreography, I feel, is fresher than others.
Choreographer Lizzie Hewitt, performs Cued In with three dancers from her Lihda Company. Hewitt’s refreshing deconstruction of the collaborative choreographic process is fiendishly clever and amusing. It is also technically cutting edge in its inclusion of just under 200 memorised hand language signs with which Hewitt and sometimes a dancer spontaneously conducts the movement and the music, making each performance truly fresh. The signs are gateways to humour and the enigmatic, to original vocabulary and monologue. It is freshly human – I mean the dancers look at each other in they eye – revitalising! If you go tonight it will probably be different and just as fresh.
Anita Hunziker & Lucy Marinkovich are up to all kinds of absurdities in Life! Death! Prizes! Rose Philpott performs Hunziker’s role. It is full of surprises (nice ones) so I’m not going to say too much. One section, that makes clever use of the dancers’ faces on ipads speaking a list of platitudes as the dynamic twosome grapple in a duet, captures the irony and astute observational window on human success, failure and bouncing back. It includes tables of trophies and rosettes, a large number of feathers, a tragically hilarious diva, the wearing of Thunderpants and tidying up. I think you probably have a picture. Yeah -no.
Rongo (Hawaiki Tu) reinvents choreography according to specific cultural parameters, depicting the Maori God of agriculture, Rongo as bringer of environmental awareness – “You reap what you sow”. Danced and choreographed by Kura Te Ua, Karena Koria and Sophie Williams, this work is haka dance theatre in which incisively technical dancing and dance vocabulary emphatically raise ihi, wana and wehi. Ancestral spiritual connections to the land are embodied with subtle choreographic structure – heartfelt. Original recorded music (Gibby Harris & Te Ua), augmented by live accompaniment (Beez Ngarino Watt), drives the furious pace with gusto.
A short film, Memory House (Loughlan Prior) opens and closes with the charismatic Sir Jon Trimmer surreally seated at a large desk surrounded by paper memories. The intelligent editing and cuts between sepia, monochrome and colour enhance the wide range of treasured memories of life a well-lived in classical ballet – romance, beauty, passion, intellect and decay. Dancers Lucy Balfour, Abigail Boyle, Dimitri Kleioris, Loughlan Prior and Maree White are delectably romantic, technically adroit and well – just stunning really. Classical music (Bach, Schubert and New Zealand’s own Francesca Mountfort) forms the perfect foil as accompaniment. Tasteful, poignant and captivating. A few crucial credits missing from the programme.
Secta (Perri Exeter) and Input/Output (Kayla Paige & Paul Edward Wilson) are darker works set in more of a traditional modern dance style and vocabulary. The seven dancers in Secta perform unisons, hinting at conformity imposed in sects, gangs and cults in a range of cultural settings. Other sections mix the fragmented use of motifs as power struggles are danced, revealing manipulation and monitoring of behaviour. On a similar theme, the very brief duet Input/Output explores the manipulation of consumers by the media. Set to speeches from The Dictator, the words are skilfully danced matching syllable for syllable.
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