Old Yeller is Liz Kirk and Ann Dewey’s cunningly curated programme. It threads diverse works into a curious whole exploring the older dancer. Nothing in this outline could prepare you for the wild diversity of the show, of which I can tell but a little.

Morag Brownlie’s riddle-some item opens. From the off, I felt pleasantly plopped into a surprising narrative in mid-flow. Brownlie, dressed in floaty yellow layers and a boa head piece – like a refined Big Bird from Sesame Street – sings ‘Purple Rain’ while preening and flapping, and executing florid vocal play. Meanwhile, projected large on the cyclorama, a canary appears among belching factories. The miners’ favourite bird, C02, mis-coloured rain… an ecological subtext looms.

Kilda Northcote matches Brownlie’s verve, playing a gauche party animal letting rip, who morphs into a French pseudo-intellectual. Eventually, Northcote enters the floodlit auditorium and distributes grapefruits. All is as odd as it sounds – made doubly so by images on the screen upstage of a naked woman shifting subtly like a lizard basking. Ever multiplying, the identical figures shrink as they increase – three, then six, then twelve… till there are fifty or more. What this item suggests I know not, but the projection is hauntingly simple.

And Old Yeller gives us drag: a strangely reframed Corneesha (alias Taane Mete). Met by the formal silence of a theatre audience, Corneesha seemed not quite able to be the fun queen she is, and which the frivolous laughter of whooping queer party crowds help her to be. In the absence of this tautoko, Mete’s commanding agility, grace and precision stand curiously exposed: I saw male strength cast in relief by a veneer of hyper-feminine sparkle.

Though Iris Wegmueller lacks a gimmick, her balletic solo is as striking as her colleagues’ experiments and her measured and mindful manner is beguiling. Wegmueller’s gaze out to the audience is quite unusual. There is nothing needy: I see a woman who knows her worth. How then do I look back at her? This is a pleasing conundrum.

The final item, choreographed by Mary-Jane O’Reilly delighted the audience – me included. To open, two slight figures limber and drill, rear lit by a rich blue wash. Even in stark silhouette, a gentle poise radiated from the pair. The theatre rippled with excitement to see Debra McCullagh and Dorothea Ashbridge – Auckland’s grande dame of ballet, who dances with precious delicacy. Each of her movements is layered with a lifetime’s experience shaping myriads of dancers. In her actions I see fine line and perfect precision, like a blade made razor sharp by an incalculable number of cuts.

Over the whole programme’s duration there was a wee stumble in the wings by one dancer on exit, and there was perhaps a teeter to some folk’s turns, but in all the night proved that it really is time to stop putting out to grass every dancer who turns forty. Indeed, in Taiaroa Royal’s sprightly gallops and piquant isolations I see nothing lacking, and few of this year’s dance school graduates could match his finesse.
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