BLOOM

NZ Portrait Gallery, Shed 11, Queen's Wharf, Wellington

09/02/2014 - 09/02/2014

Production Details

New Zealand Portrait Gallery
09 Feb 2014
1.30 and 4.30 pm
Free Entry

‘BLOOM’ Dance Performance is choreographed by Marisol Vargas and danced by Virginia Kennard and Jeremy Haxton.

Marisol Vargas is a Chilean artist whose dance works explore themes which represent the human condition, identity and happiness.

The performance for the New Zealand Portrait Gallery, BLOOM dance, is a live performance with New Zealand artists Jeremy Haxton and Virginia Kennard , who perform an interactive relationship with paintings by Piera MacArthur from The Endless Possibilities of Portraiture exhibition.

The dance project is one outcome of a Wellington internship, supported by De Ree Nucleus, which investigates creative relationships between both New Zealand and Chilean artists.

Inspired by the effervescent pictorial work of Piera MacArthur.

‘Bloom’ is a challenge to prepare for the next step to find humanity parading through it.

The dancers move in a boiling surface giving power over indestructible relationships where anything can be. The image fills the time by the space it inhabits.

A great story of body on the battle of always fighting a complacency, a sad fate, for one more creative and vital spirit.

After the second performance you are invited to share a wine in honour of the performance and for the closing of the current exhibition.

New Zealand Portrait Gallery
Shed 11, Queens Wharf
Wellington Waterfront

www.nzportraitgallery.org.nz

Dancers: Virginia Kennard and Jeremy Haxton.

Performance Art , Contemporary dance ,

20 mins

Review by Jennifer Shennan 10th Feb 2014

Portrait artist Piera McArthur’s exhibition at the Portrait Gallery has just ended. Her abundant enthusiasm to catch the vitality and character of her subjects in many paintings bursting with colour and movement was everywhere apparent.

Marisol Vargas, a Chilean artist, proposed to the Portrait Gallery a dance event, entitled Bloom, to be performed within the exhibition. Virginia Kennard and Jeremy Haxton danced through the space in a ten-minute improvisation that caught their response to McArthur’s work.

As with any gallery performance there is opportunity for ideas to resonate across art forms. There is also an adventurous edge as viewers of the exhibition may prefer to ignore the dancers posing and moving through. This puts a kind of performing frame around what they, the viewers, are doing (standing this way or that, studying the art, chewing and popping bubble gum, whatever…).

Conversely there will be tourists to the town whose mobile phones just happen to have cameras in them and so must record the performance to show to family back home, or perhaps to post on YouTube … out of context, time and place… global by afternoon teatime. Holding a camera at a live performance of course “gives licence” to the holder to move close in, out and through the performance area so that there are times when one wonders if indeed they are a planned part of the improv.

Whatever…

The dancers alternated individual as well as duo sequences, and, through their discipline and focus, caught well the energy of McArthur topsy-turvy figures for whom gravity is only one of the reference points. The programme note describes “a visual dance experience based on the human condition and the eternal quest for happiness” … which just about covers it. Well done to all involved for their enterprise. The Portrait Gallery is a beautiful space, and heartening that the building holds the city’s history.

BLOOM

Topsy turvy figures

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