Nodder’s one person show barely moves off the spot. On a bare stage with a single light as collaborator, they mutate and metamorphose through a series of tragi-comic states that are part-surreal body sculpture, part-puppetry of body parts, and part embodied storytelling. 

Only Bones – Daniel Nodder is the eleventh iteration of The Only Bones Project, created by contemporary circus and physical theatre performer Thom Monckton who is also it’s executive producer. Artists from all over the world are invited to create their own show under a uniform set of parameters: no text, no set, no props, no narrative, only one light and within one metre squared.  For this enthralling iteration, Nodder’s creative team is Fay Van Der Meulen (producer), Rebekah de Roo (lighting design and operation) and Ben Kelly (sound design).  

As a performer, Nodder has a compelling, even magnetic presence. The electric charge of the movement, its intensities and sensations, ripples under their skin like a parasite.  Its hunger leads Nodder to abandon the safe boundaries of corporeal containment.  We are led into the estrangement of flexing leg muscles rhythmically synchronised with a song. Right leg the male voice, left leg the female.  Yet their androgyny queers the pitch, turning tricks with elastic limbs and stretch fabric clothing moving beyond ‘human’ norms into something other.  Movement puzzles tease out rubik’s cube-like combinations, repurposing distal ends (fingers and toes) as characters in an extended play.  Face and hands / hands and face, speak in tongues as corrupted, partial languages.  Effortless transitions from self-absorbed movement puzzles to dialogical exchanges with audience, jolt us out of the obsession with self-objectification and into an awareness of our situatedness in the encounter between performer and audience.  Behaviours – clapping, laughter, gestures of feet and hands – are mimicked and augmented by Nodder as they skilfully incorporate our physical actions into the performance, lacing the work with a complexity of micro-perceptual exchanges.  Through quickfire shifts of attention we become part of the game.  

The simplicity of the performance design, yet its reliance upon human expressivity, agility, humour and metamorphosis, recalls the performative power of traditions of vaudeville.  Solo vaudeville acts, popular in the 19^th and early 20^th century, showcased an individual’s talent through acts of physical skill and comedic gags.  There were also references for this reviewer however in expressionist cabaret with its Freudian emphasis upon the grotesque and hysterical, and more recently, street dance styles of flexing and waving that suggest Nodder’s diverse movement trainings. The preoccupation with light, and how it plays the body, particularly when they disappear beneath their t-shirt, creates optical illusions as a morphing shadow play. Their vocal accompaniment further emphasises this.  Similar to how foley operates to generate affect, Daniel uses his voice gutturally, vocally and stutteringly, to tease out the meaning and impact of their actions.  Creating a quickfire commentary, Nodder becomes a ventriloquist projecting phonetic gestures onto an alien body. Not all of the sounds emanate from his thoracic cavity however. David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ (1969) plays whilst Nodder is suspended in space. An apposite moment when the day’s news is filled with the story of two astronauts returned to earth after nine months in outer space and the struggles they will have in rediscovering gravity and their leg muscles again.   
Only Bones is a strange title for a work that resists skeletal tone in favour of sinewy sensuality. The project is well served however by Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington based Nodder, whose physical theatre, dance and clown based skills ably meet its parameters. It would be interesting to see how this work informs what they will do next?  There is one night remaining to see Only Bones on Saturday 22 March as part of the Dunedin Fringe Festival at Te Whare o Rukutia. It’s an enthralling and entertaining performance that shines a light on human ex-centricity.

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World class. Out of this world, even.

Only Bones wouldn’t be what it is with any other dancer. This physical comedy is a mash up of rapport, electrostatic repulsion, liquid hands and innovation.

Both experimental music by Ben Kelly and the vocal effects of Daniel Nodder, dancer comic, accentuate the shapes and corners to the movements he plays out, movements which sometimes tell stories and other times are zany. His fingers clasp around a burning sun, releasing flares of light.

Montage of scrambling hands, perfect fractals, mesmerising fingertip co-ordinations, peeling and clasping, faster than eyes can register. An uncanny, supernatural dexterity and velocity. Ricochetting like subatomic particles, like nuclear fusion.

The light descends to a thigh. Before the audience is ready for it (how could we be?), one thigh muscle is lip-synching to a country tune, and we laugh in surprise. Soon the other thigh makes for a duet, replete with vibrato. Physically, how? 

Inside of his teeshirt, profiles of Nodder’s face, speaking gibberish, break into tongue play. I have never seen a tongue in the act of dancing.

Nodder is comprehensively extreme. If his mouth is open, there will be tonsils. If he’s on the ground, he will be straining to get up from it. If he’s happy, he’s beatific. This ultra-charades is a hit with all ages. So much laughter erupts from a kid in the front row. Which Nodder welcomes, with fake tsking. The kids laughs at this too.

Like this, Nodder is a natural at improvising with the audience. He teases us as applause dies down, as to who will get the last clap. A motorbike roars down the street outside the venue in a silent moment, and Nodder configures revving into his choreography. None of these playful responses is lost on the audience. When he mimics our clapping, one audience member clicks her fingers, and Nodder fans himself at her superior novelty. Someone meows. Nodder obliges. He’s having fun. That’s one tone to the night.

The other is pure artistry. Nodder’s bare, hand pendulum comes alive to the metronome clack of percussion. To simple, lullaby jazz Nodder’s hands establish a basic 2D pattern. When he slips into 4D, the movement transitions into transcendence. Flexing a wrist180 degrees and sliding it up a forearm, he opens the movement along geometric lines. Something in me lifts off like a bird.

His limbs have minds of their own. The slapstick is, he’s constantly failing to fight them into submission.

At one stage his movements are led by the breath packed into a cheek, and across to another. Bodily resourceful, Nodder has internalised a sense of dance that can know no bounds. Many practitioners might be asking themselves, of his micro inventions, why didn’t I think of that? These inventions were contingent on narrow perimeters; they arose when the team constricted their freedom to one bulb, and one meter squared.

After our ongoing applause which Nodder eventually has to wave off, he signs to thank us in NZ Sign Language, and he credits Producer Fay Van Der Meulen, Lighting Designer Rebekah de Roo and Sound Designer and Composer Ben Kelly.

After the show, I still can’t get over the fluidity in Nodder’s finger movements. He understands. ‘Waving isolations. It’s my main dance style, my training.’ Of Thom Monckton’s premise, he says, ‘We literally stayed in a dark room with a light for one week and thought of all the things we could do.’ 

Distilled. Wild. Cutting edge. I would see this twice. 

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