Two programmes – Programme 1 is 16 and 17 September; programme 2 is 19 and 20 September. Final and gala on 21 Septemebr. All shows at TAPAC. Details will be updated soon.

Dances competing:

Bended – Choreographed by  Aruna Po-Ching

About the piece – Based on Hawaiian hula genre, BENDED looks at a Polynesian woman in the 1970s dealing with Bipolar. Living daily with her erroneous actuality, we look at her manic depressive states shifting from one episode to the next, giving us a close-up of her bended reality.

Arabic Wedding – choreographed by  Candice Frankland (Phoenix Belly Dance)

Phoenix Belly Dance presents an Arabic Wedding Scene. Traditional Egyptian Zeffah with Shamadaan entrance, once used to light the way and announce the bride and groom to the guests, followed by a masculine Lebanese Zaffeh performance, and finally the raucous Ghawazee wedding entertainers. Enjoy this glimpse into an Arabic Wedding!

Fissure – choreographed by  Hannah Thompson

About the piece – “I am one, but I am many.” This work is an articulation of what words cannot express. I watched a part of you slip away from your reach, with nothing you or I could do to stop it. The cracks in the surface began to appear, the fissures grew deeper and all I could do was hold you in the great abyss. In loving memory of your darling Leanne.

My son – choreographed by  Jenny De Leon

About the piece – ‘My son’ depicts the joy, hope, beauty, and indescribable pain of being the mother of my son. He is with me – he leaves me – left here is my body and the raw emotion etched in my sinews and bones.

Safety Dance (Dance In The Workplace) – choreographed by  Katie Burton

About the piece – Dance can be risky. Accidents are commonplace. Work together to avoid injury! A tongue in cheek choreography made in response to a video found on the internet.

Rongo – choreographed by  Kura Te Ua

About the piece – RONGO’ is the Maori God of agriculture and the representation of peace. This work challenges usto forge a spiritual and co operative relationship with environment, each other and ourselves from a wairua Maori perspective, conveyed through the parallels of planting and cultivating – ‘You reap what you sow’.

Default – choreographed by  Lydia Connolly-Hiatt

About the piece – All movements start from somewhere. They might eventually get popular. In becoming popular they sometimes get reproduced so many times they become a commodity that anyone can use. This work will explore how dance can do this, and how dance does do this. For example, the classic ‘contemporary dance stare’.

Come Walk With Me – choreographed by Philippa Pidgeon

About this piece – Come Walk With Me is performed by an all-female cast, originally created as a solo and is a fun interpretation of the M.I.A. song with the same title. It is an exploration of spatial patterns and group dynamics using contemporary and ballet movement vocabulary.

Untitled – Choreographed by Shreya Gejji

About the piece – A young Indian woman waits at a train station, invisible and inconsequential to passersby. When she chances upon a throwaway object on the platform, for a fleeting moment she is emancipated from the tethers that hold her back. This is Maya’s story.

Face –  choreographed by Ula Buliruarua

About the piece – FACE: Exploring the many faces of a dancer. We can be selfish sometimes. We create a world with our movement , sometimes one that only we can see. I like watching dance and being able to create a world for the dancer/s with boots and guns and explosions or whatever. But sometimes I can’t and it’s like watching an empty space with empty people.

The Closet – choreographed by Duncan Armstrong

About the piece – This work is an insight to the vulnerable and impressionable mentality some young, gay men have to endure. The piece is a generalised to the negative impact society and smaller social circles can have on gay teens during the coming out process and is not specific to every situation.

Twisted Sisters – choreographed by Brigitte Knight –  Director (The Friday Company)

The three Moirai – Clotho (/ˈkloʊθoʊ/, Greek Κλωθώ [klɔːˈtʰɔː] – “spinner”) spun the thread of life from her distaff onto her spindle. Lachesis (/ˈlækɨsɪs/, Greek Λάχεσις [ˈlakʰesis] – “allotter” or drawer of lots) measured the thread of life allotted to each person with her measuring rod. Atropos (/ˈætrəpɒs/, Greek Ἄτροπος [ˈatropos] – “inexorable” or “inevitable”, was the cutter of the thread of life. She chose the manner of each person’s death; and when their time was come, she cut their life-thread with “her abhorred shears”.Her Roman equivalent was Morta (‘Death’).

MOTHER/JAW (excerpt) – Choreographed by Grace Woollett & Jahra Rager

About the piece – Sometimes your tongue gets cut out of your mouth at birth. Sometimes your mother gives you salt instead of water. Sometimes you dye your clothes with someone else’s clay. Sometimes you mistake being a woman with being everyone else at once. A two part work: Inspired by Grace Taylor’s poetry collection, ‘Afakasi Speaks’.

Combdrums – choreographed by Jess Quaid

About the piece – Waiting. With no visible end point. Tick tock… the spaces between seconds can breed all manner of oddities. (This one’s for you Jack… we’ll always have the dead spaces).

So Euro – choreographed by Lucy-Margaux Marinkovich

About the piece – So Euro is a brief choreographic reflection upon my experiences of being a New Zealand spectator of European dance-theatre. So Euro audaciously explores absurdity and ambiguous abstractedness in contemporary dance performance.

Soul Cake choreographed by Rose Philpott

The initials of the precious stones mounted on the band spelled out the word “regard” in an implicit acrostic.

Each show is 1 hour long