Te Pou Theatre’s welcoming kaimahi and spacious foyer is a semi-industrial-cafe-cultural-centre and a pleasure to hang out in as we await the debut work from Brydie Colquhoun (Ngāpuhi) & Atamira Dance Company with Bianca Hyslop (Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue-kaipapa, Tūhourangi-Ngāti Wāhiao, Pākeha) at the helm.

This site has housed many a creative spirit in previous Corban Estate forms. It is now a strong Māori, multicultural arts, dance and theatre venue with a welcome versatility in its theatre layouts.

A growing audience is gathering: community, artistic peers, industry, funders, stakeholders, friends and whānau (including my young girls and an Italian exchange student) are introduced in te reo Māori and English to the work and asked to take a ‘deep breath and enjoy the journey’ before we enter. A setting is already in place, alerting us to what’s to come with care. To know that it is an invitation to intimacy, and the audience can move around freely and be as close/far as they choose. I do like mystery, but this pre-entrance mihi feels good, supporting a language of body and approach already present in the title Rongo Whakapā – a sense of touch – healing – the combination of kupu ‘listen’ and ‘contact’ as my online Māori translator tells me.

And so it is, as we listen and witness the ephemeral ethics of care that dance inherently engages in.

Performers Abbie Rogers (Kāi Tahu, Te Arawa) Caleb Heke (Ngāpuhi) Jeremy Beck (Kāi Tahu) Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Rangitāne) Sean MacDonald (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Raukawa, Tūwharetoa, Rangitāne) Tai Taranui Hemana (Te Arawa) are embodied practitioners in my eyes, bringing the work and its scenography alive with astonishingly beautiful contact and connections to self and the other. 

Colquhoun’s concept and direction hold principles to respond, shift, and co-create with ease, heart and social relation. Yet there is a rigour and attention to spatial detail and choreographic structuring. Rituals are performative. We enter and remove our shoes, and hang our wet rain coats on the hangers. The oblong dark space, ‘in the round’, minimal seating, frames a grey flooring with six 90-degree panels of greyish white tones, creating a mini maze of entrances and exits. Some dancers and the choreographer herself are amongst the panels, leaning their heads against the frames, listening and signalling us to join.  

The soundscore by the well-admired composer for dance in Australasia, Eden Mullholland (Ngāti Porou), begins with layered recorded conversations from the company discussing different kinds of scenarios, issues, and thoughts related to intimacy. I listen but don’t hear all the words, as I am more struck by where the sound is coming from. Here, the technical prowess of the production team starts to shine as I realise the frames are speaking. It’s a sound conduction through the metal frames (so Mulholland tells me at the time), and the screens can be altered to be seen through or opaque. Production manager Emmanuel Reynaud, Rowan Pierce ( Lighting and Spatial design) and technical consultant, Robert Larsen (Ngāti Awa ki te Awa o te Atua), bring the biggest challenge to this work, although I am aware of some operational complications and rechoreographed sections due to the screens not working, I am still impressed with the attempt and the audience does not lose a thing. 

The act of dance is the saving grace as the work evolves an articulate ‘depth and beauty of movement expression and all its subtleties’ as the company board trustee, Moana Nepia (Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga a Hauiti, Rongowhakaata) aptly sums up after the show.  

As audience and performers casually intermingle whilst listening, there is a distinctive shift of attention and the ‘participatory’ steps back a little. Performers are like anomalies, and they can switch into performance modes like instinctive animals. We start to glimpse distinctive meetings of solos, trios, and duos, and we sense already that we are very close to their performing biosphere. The audience retreats, and the stage lighting shifts. Rowan’s well-known multimedia expertise and operator Bekky Boyce create a critical role of lighting states, guiding our eyes and setting scenes throughout the piece. No colour gels, but arrays of white lightness, sharpness, softness, speed and shape. It is a stunning design.

My eyes are drawn to Sean McDonald and his supernatural ability to awaken a story in me. The nonverbal of dance is beautifully embodied through just his presence, and once again, I enjoy his depth of experience. However, this piece does not have ‘stars’ or favourites but a collection of individual embodied points of view through fluid, elastic, sensorial movements and touch. Even the panel movements are graceful and elegant. I enjoy how they become huts/tents with a single form inside, a state of loneliness and safety at the same time.  

The music weaves conversations throughout the work, with specific moments of rhythmic drive allowing dancing patterns to arrive and build cohesion in the work. A beat of clacking wood on wood, and an assembly of three bodies sitting with one lying figure directly pronounces an image of healing and manaaki (care & support), whilst a shimmering light captures dancer, Caleb Heke, in a liquid solo of swift morphing forms of dexterity. He epitomises thick oil and water simultaneously. The depth of the space is harnessed well in parts, composing the ‘field of play’ with embodied narrative, still image and dancing bodies. 

McDonald and Rogers side by side, shadowing and sharing movement gestures, reveal a celebrated tool in contemporary dance making today, whereby movements are choreographed in unison yet individually expressed with differences in timing and way. This resonates ‘life’. We fall into routines and structures, but nothing is the same, and outcomes are shared experiences, respecting others’ different pathways within them. This duet, along with the gorgeously felt sense of contact play between Beck and Ruckstuhl-Mann early in the work, are symbolic reference to how we can co-compose. Contact improviser Ruckstuhl Mann is exemplary in her sensorial skills, and Beck brings a kind of natural theatrical meaning to all he does without doing too much. These are distinguished performers with many years of deep movement making, and I celebrate their collaborations here. They move me. 

There are many moments I feel my dancing spine enjoying the currents of the dancers’ vibes, from Roger’s sharp shifting gestures in strobed tones, Beck’s abandoned softly-strong swirling floor movements, to McDonald’s gentle wildness flaring into the space; a captivating solo near the end of the work. One indelible moment is a slowly moving form, Tai Taranui Hemana enclosed (protected? imprisoned?) by the panels; a more dynamic soloing that brings in some vocal sounds of effort and release, building up to a freedom from the structure.  Taranui Hemana is the youngest of the performers, yet holds the space beautifully and brings a well-needed counterpoint expression of struggle in the work (healing needs the unhealed), and Heke joins him in a fleeting but fabulous duo of entangled care and support. 

Conversations return and somewhere I hear snippets “touch is not sexual or rushed… it feels so utterly alive.. the love and fragility of the whakapapa’  and I reflect briefly on a personal family trait of little touch, recognising how much I appreciate the dancing life that deeply challenges this sensorial retraction in humans.

And that is a brave takeaway from this work. Why not embrace the act of play/care/healing through touch? Playfighting or just hugging the ones around you and perhaps minimising the need for clinical healthcare, but I crack a complex egg here and digress. 

But we are witnessing complexities in this work, of production values, set and bodies in a scenic dance that is open to how we perceive the elements at play. But ultimately, what is seen offers us insights into what is unseen. The process that Colquhoun employed to arrive at a work of gentle strength and some sublime improvised and set dancing is admired for a debut choreography. Even dance tropes like a group unison cluster of contained isolated body movement, reminiscent of Hofesh Schecter’s tribal like choreography, are a welcome part. Yet I look for more meaning, and the central figure, Ruckstuhl-Mann, well protected by the close outer circle, could build a dramaturgy here. She represents another story from somatic values in everyday practice and a mother on the stage with many stories to tell. This whakapapa of women is further captured as they separate and lead a song echoed by the male (inlcusive of gender fluid) performers, a brief moment of tradition seeping in and rushing away again. 

Flashes of light, shadows and luminous textures bring the beige and brown costumes into earthly glows. Piano and violin, sample loops, Cook Island rhythms (as I perceive), melding into a tuning orchestra are all delicious encounters of the aural kind, and the wonderful soundscore devolves back to the conversations.  A voiced text from Beck asks many questions about how other-than-human things might experience life. “Does a plant experience emotions? He finishes with ‘does my body allow for intimacy? I’d like to think it does”.  Don’t we all? The dancers disappear from the stage. Leaving a composed structure of the panels, interdependent and layered, just as we are. The lights remain contoured, and so we sit with this image for a while after the applause. It feels unfinished, but that could be the point.

My notes are hard to read now, and several impressive images are not noted here. You must go yourself.

Rongo Whakapā is a consensual play in dance that knows its boundaries, yet freedoms are aplenty.  Ngā mihi Atamira for supporting Colquhoun’s choreographic voice. As Artistic Director, Hyslop says afterwards, “it takes a village…’ and this work is full of the co-creators’ voices yet styled into the choreographer’s growing identity as a maker that brings a world of wānaga, community, Mātanga Mātauranga Māori, and discourse into the creative process. Bravo. Sometimes, performance outcomes are a shimmer of the deeper connections being made during the making. This is certainly an impressive start. 

Note: It says limited capacity for audience numbers, yet I feel there is plenty of space for more people. Fill up the room, make us feel a crowd of closeness supporting an intimate work, not a first-time experiment for a few, but a fully fledged performance event for hundreds to see. Mauri ora!

The season runs until this Sunday.

Saturday 12 July 2025, 4pm
Saturday 12 July 2025, 7:30pm
Sunday 13 July 2025, 2pm
Sunday 13 July 2025, 5pm

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