Should dance be a consumer product spoon fed to us to brighten up our day like soft serve television? Or, can dance be something that we have to work a little harder for – something that forces us into a place of not knowing, a place of discomfort?.

I think it should at the very least challenge us in some way.  Art should be a place where both artist and audience alike are seeking new perspectives and practising the art of asking questions.

Footnote are endeavouring to support  artists who are trying to do exactly that in different ways. And it is a bold and brave place to position itself in the political and artistic climate of New Zealand. I appreciate that these ideas were raised for me while I watched this show.

Can dance be political? Should it be? What form should these political statements take and from what traditions of dance do these politics arise?

I was very intrigued by Footnote NZ Now 2014 season. The title suggests the works are about the here and now – and addressing what that means. So here and now: an election year, a Wellington-based government funded company are touring to other centres and in Christchurch, and here the works are framed by the cardboard walls of our transitional cathedral. Beautiful young bodies work hard to engage with the politics of each of the works. The context seems to be a loaded gun of church and state proportions.

I am well aware of the freedom of process and content that Footnote gives to its choreographers (albeit generally under tight time constraints). It was fascinating to see that all the artists seemed to want to explore and express politics and the body politic in one way or another.

Craig Bary’s work, Depends on You, wants us to ‘catch a glimpse’ into the politics of sexuality. The highlight of the work was a small, subtle solo by Olivia Macgregor. She is in fact a strong presence throughout the evening. A beauty of Milla Jovovich proportions who is not afraid to be anything but beautiful. Her movement in this work was unfamiliar and tantalising – a forbidden body perhaps but not a body afraid to explore, opening itself up to the audience to make fresh discoveries. I would have loved this to have been explored more deeply and perhaps it is in the full-length work. I did question the reasoning behind presenting excerpts of a full work in a triple bill evening. It seemed that in this format the work fell shy of being able to address any unexplored territory pertaining to the politics of sexuality.

Lyne Pringle’s work Thin Air  aims to be far more explic at stating her politics in relation to the environment. One technique employed is the use of text in various ways – titles on costumes such as “Optimist Dreamy’ and “Business as Usual”, sound bytes from National Radio with well-known radio personalities including Kim Hill, who we hear ask the question; “what’s the difference between art and propaganda?” as well as the dancers adding to pre-recorded sound effects in a comic faux fight scene. I found myself asking if dance needs these ‘sign posts’ to be able to make sense and state a political position? Pringle finishes her work shortly after ‘business as usual’ falls on his own sword, proposing a future whereby a delicate ecosystem is supported by a sense of community body.

Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad come from a very different political perspective with Low. In fact they come from a different tradition of contemporary dance, mainly having trained and made work in the US. The political positioning seems about dance and the body itself. It was great to see quotes from the dancer’s perspectives of the work and process in the programme notes – to me a statement of a shifting of power positioning between dancers and choreographers. So rarely are dancers actually given a voice in this way. The company all seem well informed and embody this work with integrity. Bieringa and Ramstad manage to challenge while still making us smile, using somatics as the vehicle for the material while still employing a sense of outward presentation with complex physical narratives. There is an ancient and ritualistic feeling to this work but it does feel of the here and now.

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At the opening of Footnote New Zealand Dance’s new season of original works by New Zealand choreographers at the Herald Theatre in Auckland, NOW 2014, the title of this new choreographic initiative had me wondering if the intended angle of marketing for such a platform might be to foreground current and contemporary innovative approaches to choreographic practice (?).

The three works presented were Depends on You by Craig Bary, Thin Air by Lyne Pringle, and Low by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad of The Body Cartography Project.

Depends on You was a reworked excerpt from the full length Straight Laced which premiered earlier this year. It felt to me like a partially formed sentence perhaps best comprehended within the context of the full work. The partnering was seductive and sensitive but perhaps a little predictable in terms of a choreographic vocabulary.

How as dance makers do we deal with the trace of choreographers’ ideas and methods that we have previously encountered in working relationships?

I was expecting from Depends on You a personalised take on the struggles of coming to terms with being a gay man in a predominantly homophobic society. Disappointingly though, I couldn’t find a way into the body of the choreography to really connect with each character’s individuality, and found the depiction of the characters to be somewhat two-dimensional. The push for a narrative in this social commentary overshadowed the potential input of the dancers; it felt like there was no space in the choreography for these highly skilled performers to fully engage psychologically or intuitively within their given roles.

As Sam Trubridge has already discussed in another review of NOW 2014, Thin Air by Lyne Pringle deals with environmental issues from the perspective of >>concern<<. Words on cloth are safety-pinned to the formal suits worn by the dancers, somewhat like activist patches that signal a political angle on various common human responses to climate change and the seriousness of ozone depletion (my interpretation). Like Trubridge, I found myself questioning the use of didactic signposting – perhaps overstating a well-worn moralistic viewpoint. In particular I question the representational use of words when paired with performers-as-stereotypes in the choreographic form, as I feel like language tends to dumb down the complexity of the body as a field of vast intelligence. Whilst there was a sense of humour and playfulness around the labelling of the various behavioural responses – ‘denialist’, ‘alarmist’, ‘business as usual’ – does this capture a useful interpretation of our subjective strategies for dealing with the notion of environmental crisis? The dancers appeared to be feeling restricted in the improvisational tasks offered by this work, perhaps limited by the singular descriptive identifiers assigned to them.

Does combining dance with verbal language in this way limit our potential readings of the physical language being communicated through dance?

The saving grace of this work for me was the ending image where ideas, visions and beliefs are plucked from the performers’ minds, mapped through delicate little gestures and articulations and then flicked out into the world like a prayer for peace, creative imagination and hope.

In the third approach to developing a choreographic language presented in this programme, Low by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad presents a structure in which the dancers are plainly fully invested in the physically motivated material (as opposed to the more conceptually driven previous works). In an interview with Radio New Zealand [here] Bieringa describes how the anatomy of the pelvis was the starting point for the development of Low, also emphasising a valuing of the agency of the dancers in the choreographic process. As suggested in the programme notes, this work engages with viscerality and it is certainly a sensuous and guttural response that I experience from this work. I want to simply say – erotic pelvic intelligence.

And then I want to babble about the contagious power and energy in these movement investigations. I want to explore for myself how attending to the pelvis can lead to the open sensitised embodiments that I saw on the stage with Low. I also want to somehow capture for you the generosity of the dancers’ responsivity with the audience, and the resonant affect of the choreographic material of bodily sounding which creates a strange emotive feeling of being stirred inside my stomach, intestines, sexual organs.

Low is a sexy and intriguing piece of choreography to be party to. The work foregrounds choreography as a conduit for social research. It socialises unique methods for empathising guttural feeling-tones through the performance space as artistic practice.

Minnesota-based choreographers, Bieringa (ex-pat Kiwi)and her partner Ramstad, are channelling into this country highly specialised and valuable bodily and performative knowledge. They bring with them an exciting contemporary approach to choreography-as-research which exemplifies what I see to be a potential direction for Footnote’s NOW program.

Will NOW contribute to the gaping lack of support in the New Zealand Contemporary Dance milieu for research based choreographic practices?

With growing numbers of local dance practitioners developing innovative approaches to dance-making, yet no funding support from Creative New Zealand for research based projects, will Footnote spearhead the much needed infrastructural support for this area of choreographic development happening in Aotearoa? Or will our research-motivated artists continue to move offshore in search of artistic communities who welcome their experimental ways of working?

In order to carve a line of distinction from Footnote’s own Made in New Zealand programme, perhaps NOW, in reflecting on its first season, might spot this potential for emphasising a research based approach to dancemaking. Is it timely that NOW aligns New Zealand’s contemporary d.ance scene with choreographic developments happening internationally.  

An honoring of this show goes to the Footnote dancers themselves, in this case: Emily Adams, Emma Dellabarca, Olivia McGregor, Manu Reynaud and Luigi Vescio. Their passionate commitment brings to life each of these three works. The unique skills of these dancers, as movers, improvisers and performers, is what we come to see, just as much as the choreography on show. ‘Olivia’ and ‘Emma’ for example become like choreographic works into which we invest and engage our own passionate involvement in, and dialogue   around the event. It is the nature of the work included in this first season of NOW, particularly with Low, that allows space for us to really see these dancers as highly individual specialised artists. 

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The new Hannah Playhouse opened its doors last night for the first ever Footnote New Zealand Dance NOW season. While this mixed bill format has been run by Footnote for some time, this is its first under the new management structure run by Richard Aindow and its new Artistic Advisory Panel. It is also the first time for the company at Hannah Playhouse for a while (itself a venue under some change) after many years presenting at the State Opera House.

Featured in the lineup are new works by Lyne Pringle and Olive Beiringa with Otto Ramstad (from the Body Cartography Project), as well as an extract from Craig Bary’s Straight Laced. It is fantastic to see such an internationally experienced team working with Footnote, bringing NZ born choreographers who are working overseas an opportunity to return home and share their work with local audiences.

Starting the lineup is Craig Bary’s short piece – entitled Depends On You. It forms a cute ‘overture’ for the evening, providing an abstract section to frame the works that follow. Dancers enter variously, and after some awkward spoken dialogue Olivia McGregor breaks into an exquisite sequence: twisting her limbs into weird articulations, investigating it from various angles, and carrying the tensions of five different bodies in her movements. Manu Reynaud and Footnote newcomer Luigi Vescio also have a wonderful duet that is at the same time tender, competitive, aggressive, and well coordinated. It is possible to see in moments like this the assured nature of Reynaud’s movement, that belies his greater experience. But all the same, newcomers Vescio and Emma Dellabarca bring an exciting and electric new energy into the company. 

By contrast with Bary’s work (where interpersonal connections are built like a web across the stage) Lyne Pringle’s Thin Air works with the Footnote ensemble as a unified body, a corps, striding across the stage in baggy work trousers and collared shirts. The music is jangling, confident, and poppy. It is a work that wears its heart on its sleeve, and lays its intentions bare, where the other works are shrouded in ambiguity, abstraction, and impressionism. From the opening extracts from radio interviews in the score, it is clear that Thin Air deals with environmental concerns, further emphasised by the signs pinned to the backs of the performers’ jackets, labeling one as the ‘denialist’, another as the ‘alarmist’, and yet another bearing the inscription ‘business as usual’. It is a contentious addition to the performance language, that brings up questions about how effective didactic signposts like this are on stage, threatening to turn the work into a diagram of its ideas. Pringle’s intentions are noble, and the unison work is very compelling, with the ensemble really throwing themselves into it with beautiful abandon and commitment. However, one is left wondering how dance alone could be used to communicate Pringle’s concern about the environment, sharing this with the audience in this medium, rather than relying on overstated devices in the sound design or costuming to make the connections. Certainly the work undergoes a transformation in its last sequence, where the earthbound figures lose their weight and seem to float from the ground, drifting, gesticulating, sweeping the air, and reaching for something… It is a hard gambit, because this ambiguity alone is bound to let the audience ‘off the hook’, and relieve some of the urgency of Pringle’s message.

The final half of the evening is reserved for Olive Beiringa and Otto Ramstad’s work Low. It is an awkward, frenetic, punky, funky piece of contemporary dance, structured around six or so songs by artists like Peaches, The Roots, PJ Harvey, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Like a badly DJed party or game of musical chairs, there are big lapses between the tracks, which the dancers fill with vague movements before exploding into action when the music recommences.

At times I am reminded of UK dancer Michael Clark’s own dalliances with grungy music, particularly when Emily Adams scrambles around to PJ Harvey, or when Emma Dellabarca bursts on stage in a spangly silver sequined top, thrashing to some upbeat funk. But the greatest praise must go to Olivia Macgregor for the fantastic transformation of her body in this programme: somehow she has managed to tap into something altogether more grotesque in her movements, so ugly it is beautiful, appearing angular, surly, flexible, sleazy, and assured of even the most incongruous of movements. Her entrance echoes Dellabarca’s own appearance, dressed in another sparkling silver top. But Macgregor is slower, more calculated, and precise. Adams seems to have undergone a similar transformation since I last saw her as well, and it is clear that Beiringa and Ramstad’s provocation to make the performance more ‘visceral’ has really been understood by these two dancers.

The whole work itself is a little hard to fathom, with long sections between songs involving unison floorwork and vocalisations that resemble a warm-up or movement workshop for theatre students. The Body-Mind-Centering (c) qualifications of the choreographers are too clear here, indulging a process over the product and the performers’ inner journey over the any reading of the work. This in itself is interesting to me, contrasting as it does with the overtly sexualised, posturing, exhibitionist contortions that explode on stage for us when a song comes on.

In particular there is a fantastic moment near the end when the dancers lunge towards the audience to the insistent beat of what sounds like an Angolan Hip Hop track. Convulsing like possessed voodoo dancers (watch Buraka Som Sistema’s fantastic video to Sound of Kuduro), the dancers combine the internalised trance-like movement with something frenetic, sweaty, and in-your-face, with the white of the eye rolling and flashing. This movement spills into the auditorium, before returning to the stage with a beautiful string of loose, expansive pirouettes from Vescio. He is quickly followed by the whole cast , as they all spin, hair whirling, keeping their marks on the spot – like dervishes sublimating to something internal again, selfless, and distant.

In documenting these works in this review it is possible to embellish the experience beyond what may appear to be there. However, it is important to note that dance does not impress itself on the senses in the same direct way that words do: or for that matter, a TV advert, music video, or serialised episode. To describe these works in this way risks stripping them of their mystery, their intrigue, and their difficulty.

While it may be frustrating at times, dance like this is not a product, but a process of contemplation or meditation expressed through the language of movement: using the mood swings, textures, patterns, symbols and flavours of the expressive body. It is movement for the sake of movement, and (unlike other familiar kinetic forms of distraction) it doesn’t need an oddly shaped ball to make sense of it; nor is it mime, charades, or sign language. The games that dance plays are more complex than any of these things.

And like rugby, it does not need to be understood, or to have meaning – rather it is enough to follow it, enjoy the technicalities, the athleticism, the frustrations and excitements that build. The rugby ball becomes the proverbial “it” that we either get or we don’t, an idea or meaning passed between the dancers across the space that we are constantly in pursuit of. It may be as simple as an energy that is thrown around the room, a recognisable motif, or a heartbreaking concern about the planet’s well being. In any case it is something that we follow with intent, and as frustrating as contemporary dance can be, there is beauty and risk in this encounter.

Footnote NZ Dance continue to preserve a culture of kinetic literacy in Wellington and New Zealand with bold programmes and guest choreographers like this. I look forward to sitting with them again as they move confidently forward in 2014.

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