Any trip to Wellington’s annual Performance Arcade is a serendipitous experience — a journey into uncertainty, with something different offered in each container and corner of the waterfront. No sooner had I arrived at this year’s arcade than I realised I was certainly not in Kansas (or Wellington) anymore.

As a dance artist and dance writer, my interest lies mostly in the Bodybox Series of the festival, where containers on the waterfront showcase body and movement-based performance. However, I am drawn into the Container Series where the technology is vast: live projections, sculptural instruments, harmonic soundscapes, relics and textiles. On my way, I come across a container with a bright red phone box, winking at me from the busy, market-fringed shoreline. It reminds me of a night in Manhattan when I discovered an under-the-stairwell speakeasy via a phone booth in a hotdog joint.

This experience, Red Phone, curated by Boca del Lupo (a Canadian interdisciplinary theatre company led by Artistic Directors Sherry J. Yoon and Jay Dodge), is similarly unexpected. I am invited to walk up to the receiver and follow the prompts on the screen. A playscript by established playwrights is in live action, with someone on the other end reading the opposite part. I am asked if I am comfortable with profane language; our script concerns a ruptured relationship, a dispute between siblings over their father’s dying wishes. For me, the experience is cathartic: my dramatic Hollywood thriller moment, caught in a phone booth, acting out an unseen script full of sensational lines and raw emotion. As I hang up the receiver, I exhaled. “That was cathartic,” I told the usher, reminded, once again, that the best thing about this festival is its immersive nature: Performance art at its most absorbing, where audience members are invited into the action, if they wish.

In the Container Series, an innovative piece by dance artists Bikka Ora and Alexa Wilson stands out. Inside the container, sky is projected onto the walls while the artists are out on the ocean in a raft, capturing the live footage. The live sky feed is fascinating — audience members recline underneath it, each performance capturing the unique “onceness” of the aerial landscape, with wind, swell and waves foregrounding a “more-than-human” presence. The vastness of the ocean and the intimacy of the dark container make for an ingenious contrast, carrying an almost mystic feeling. It brings to mind the words of the 13th-century Iranian poet Rumi: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.” A beautiful moment to feel both the insignificance of the self and the enormity of Te Whanganui-a-Tara’s harbour.

It is a delight to spend ten minutes in the container housing interdisciplinary artist Helena May’s work, Not Forever, Just For Now. Walking in, I find a seat among ottomans and cushions as birdsong plays and soft light is projected into the space, wind and illumination rustling through translucent fabrics — an invitation to rest and be present. At various points over the weekend, May collaborated with a friend, dancing to live violin, sure to pull at the heartstrings of anyone who wanders in. I feel calm and cared for, leaving that little container of light and comfort.

A durational work Bodies of Earth by Dance Plant Collective, in the Bodybox Series, is a gorgeous engagement with eco-somatics, inviting audiences to consider our relationships with land, place and earth — environmental collapse, disconnection and grief, but also resilience, beauty and interconnection between all living beings. Dancers tug and balance over calico soaked in earthen material, connecting, separating, weaving and oscillating in patterns that echo flow in nature: a river over bedrock, a glacier across a mountainside. We are invited to feel as much as to witness — and, continuing the festival’s overarching theme, this too feels healing.

The embodied offerings at this year’s Performance Arcade reach into the built environment and draw in parts of audiences rarely invited into performance spaces. That invitation is both welcome and nurturing. I look forward to seeing the festival grow in this direction and remain, as always, amazed by the overflowing worlds and sentiments that can be held within something as modest and intimate as a shipping container.

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The Performance Arcade, now in its 15th year, occupies a niche corner of Wellington wharf behind Te Papa o Tongarewa, a multi-day festive offering of eclectic performance artivism.

The Container series is the signature of the arcade, with shipping containers converted into platforms and spaces for live performance, engagement, interaction, workshops and collaboration.

Every year, a deluge of applications from around the motu and further abroad pitch versions of concepts that make this event unique. The open call brings artists from all stages of their respective evolution, and particularly this year for the unifying theme “Haerenga Moana”.

I witnessed two days of the event, the first day was grey, cold with wild winds and the second day was the complete opposite, hot, blue skied and calm. The weather played a major part in influencing the different aspects, including the number of audiences attending. Despite that, the artists continued to activate their spaces, which was admirable and also part of the unseen labour of site-specific performance.

During my facilitation of Artist Talks II: “Wāhi Huihuinga” – containers that I visited with participants that caught my attention included:

Zane Binglethorne (Ngāti Tumutumu, Tainui), a 22-year-old sonic artist, experimental creator, and Hip Hop/Rap musician from Pōneke. His work “Harmonic Hegemony” is a three-part immersive sonic and visual installation that explores weaponised sound as both a psychological and physical force. In his container, my friends and I embodied the striking vibrations, we felt drawn to creating shadow interplay on the fast-moving digital images. We felt the charge of connectivity relating to themes of Palestine and the oppression of marginalised Indigenous groups.

Across from that container was a work called “Not Forever, Just For Now” by Helena May (Te Atiawa) that was a soft, fabricated, adorned translucent space with cushions for comfort. We took our shoes off to enter and spent a moment in conversation with the artist. Helena’s practice of atmospheric world-building centres on people and the present moment, challenging our connection to each other and our depth of care. We were invited into a sitting meditation which circulated through the tinana and resonated in our responses and mihi. It was a needed moment of quiet repose amongst the many competing soundtracks and pedestrian sounds. BREATH.

One of the most rigorous artists was a senior practitioner from Australia, Alan Shacher, a performance and installation artist whose work investigates the confluence of site, materials, bodies, and histories. His work “Containments, Contained” was an ever-shifting container installation working, reworking, tying and untying, a series of refrigerator cardboard boxes, suspended with different rigging and placed in relation to the spatial shifts of the environment, including the artist’s body itself as a dynamic paradigm. He spoke about not being satisfied and constantly working on how the space could meet a new potential as the days went on.

Alongside this was a new stage for live performance programming, Te Ara Moana Moves, staged on a marley floor loaned by Footnote Dance Company. Attached to the concrete and backed against a container wall, which also served as a makeshift dressing room.

Curated by Tupe Lualua, this space responded to political shifting currents, the sharing of stories through movement and connecting of artists from Aotearoa, Moana Nui ā Kiwa and Africa. I arrived for Artist Talks II – “Te Tinana me te Wairua” – featuring Lualua, Ojeya Cruz Banks, Misty Frequency, Taumata Whitireia, Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald and the audience. We assembled at the Container – “Black Salt, Black Stone” by Studio Kiin. Through song, karakia, talanoa, Lualua created an inclusive space for everyone to discuss themes of diaspora and cultural identity, authenticity and transmission. I was grateful for this opportunity to interweave whanaungatanga with these artists, recognising the protocols that united and separated us through our individual experiences, insights and aspirations.

Later in the evening, I witnessed a series of their performances. Starting with Misty Frequency (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngā Rauru, Kai Tahu, Scotland) who shared “Ngā Waka Pepeha”:’Plastic Māori’. This was a short solo presentation of a drag persona embodiment exploring shame, guilt and colonisation, through the lens of an emerging artist, as a wayfinder, on a journey of self-discovery. A face painted like a Pou, in black, red, and white, representing Te Iwi Māori me Kōtimana (Scotland). Waving in the tipuna, the wind picks up, and there is a roar as the beat drops. In spiky plastic black kākahu, piupiu tassles, rope wrapped around the neck and ribcage, Misty calls for Reparation, Reclamation, Restitution, Restoration, to Remember, before they sashay away.

Taumata Whitireia then presented “We Are Connected by the Ocean”, a five-part performance work that demonstrated their astonishingly multi-skilled expertise across the contemporary, Māori and Pasifika dance forms of Haka, Siva, and Ura. Though newly graduated, this quartet of wāhine dancers exemplified diverse capabilities from precision sung harmonies to working across cultural forms, implements, energies and performative genres, seamlessly linked together by beautiful transitions highlighting each dancer and signalling a new form as the piece evolved.

“Alkamal Walkamal Almutlaq” was a solo dance work adapted from theatre into a site-specific response by Asanda Ruda (South Africa) that traversed the terrain of generational alienation, political defiance, and personal emancipation. Wearing a transparent black shift dress, the dancer got caught in a criss-cross of barrier tapes, the wind creating an unforgiving space which emphasised the themes of the work and drew heightened empathy as a body in an urban setting, asking ‘How can the self find harmony in a world marked by political and cultural constraints?’

Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald presented a solo “I want revenge, grandma”, which was part dance, spoken word, community action and archival material. Drawing from her Kpelle heritage, she activated cultural memory as a tool for imagining new futures, asking what becomes possible after generations of harm and what accountability might look like today. As the night became dark, and the air colder, for both audience and performer, we had to literally lean in to hear her voice above the roar of the wind gusts, and the nighttime video projections happening on the side of the Te Papa wall.

In this convergence, there were unintentional connections through similarly themed moments colliding and intersecting. This is where the Te Ara Moana stage showed its unique character as rugged waves and circulating currents pulsated. The finale to the evening was a moment of the audience being asked for money to place in the soil as symbolic reparations for the extreme colonial extractions from her ancestral lands. Her concluding dance uplifted the energy and sent it out into the cosmos of the night.

Other parts of The Performance Arcade included a travelling work “Ko te Akau” by luminary avant-garde performer Charles Koroneho (Ngāpuhi, Te Mahurehure, Te Parawhau, Ngāti Hau). His mysterious, brooding interventions were placed around the spaces, from underneath a bridge adorned with dark, crinkled, transparent cloths that danced all day in the wind, and his hermetic ritualised use of fibreglass rakau, shimmering in Te Po.

Bodybox, was a specially designed container serving as both a gallery and a stage, hosting performance art and movement-based works throughout the day and evening. (See here for my review of “Bodies of Earth” by Dance Plant Collective)

The Live Music Series gave space for whanau to sit under trees, picnic, eat from the food trucks or pop-up bars, with an eclectic array of programming. I absolutely loved Wellington-based DJ Collective 6IXHAND, who created an atmosphere that felt like home for POC in the room — energetic, familiar, and joyfully alive. At one point, I looked around, and it was as if we were all in a music video, having the best party of our lives. It was such a great way to unite and disperse, gathering up all of this goodness on our journey across the continuums of time, existence and being.

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