In their commitment “to staging compelling, relevant works” New Zealand Dance Company under acting director Caroline Bindon invites us to confront a duality In Stage of Being – two worlds: one bucolic, one dystopian –  where the protagonists examine and enact emotive responses to situational triggers.  The two realms are brought to life by some exquisite dancing by Katie Rudd, Ngaere Jenkins, Brydie Colquhoun, Chris Mills, ‘Isope ‘Akau’ola and Oliver Carruthers. Their characterisations and commitment are next level – processing and articulating the choreographic nuances with precision and drive.

Choreographers Xiao Chao Wen and Xin Ji have created a bleak setting in Made in Them, a work of dynamic intensity to music by Benny Jennings, that wages a visual and aural onslaught on the senses. A lighting rig lowered to the half-way point, consisting of multiple focused lamps, in a brilliant design by Elekis Poblete Teirney, suggests an oppressive, underground world where nothing escapes detection. Individuals are sought out and spotlighted while above the rig, puffs of a hazy substance suggest obfuscation and cover-up.  Katie Rudd opens the work dancing up a storm in a solo that initially hugs the floor but gradually ascends as though enacting a rite of passage, to standing position –  where she is rewarded with a black, shiny, globular helmet.

The helmets which cover the faces of the dancers when worn, appear to have a metaphorical intent – masking the “authentic selves” that the choreographers are seeking to expose through the work and pressuring the performers into a conformist mode.  The costume design by Andreas Mikelis of black boiler suits, reflects the austerity of the work with the helmets reflecting spots of light as an intriguing element of the design.

The choreographic vocabulary often features tensely held bodies and sharp staccato movements or the opposite way of moving, but still with a relentless and surging thrust, when the performers are free of constraints – usually when their helmets are removed. The dancers sometimes perform a sort of “thug walk” with hunched shoulders and simian, swinging arms, while a disembodied voice instructs and warms of consequences if disobeyed.

Oliver Carruthers is superb as the redemptive figure who through his example encourages a freeing of the state of being in his fellow travellers. His height enables sinuous and striking lines to emerge as he folds, unfolds and stretches his body. The work ends on a redemptive note but the threat apparently remains – perhaps as a deterrent.

Choreographer Tupua Tigafua establishes a different vista in his work  LittleBits and AddOns, to  music by David Long.   It is a fantasy world where the dancers adopt avian or animal-like characterisations, to suggest a rustic vision of an innocent, unsullied world, where anything is possible.  His choreographic vocabulary is softer and more playful but there are also darker references, when the dancers are enveloped in cloth, immobile and stationary on the ground, or peering outwards, through a shadowed window frame, projected onto the backdrop.  At one point a chicken is cornered and covered with a sack over its head, so that the threat of doom is imminent. The suggestion being that Utopia is perhaps a transient state. 

Tigafua uses small clusters of wooden building-blocks possibly to depict the small scale of our aspirations, and the way in which they can be altered by outside forces – in this case groups of dancers, rushing onstage and covertly altering the structures that have been carefully placed on the ground. This resonates in a world that appears to be in a state of flux with norms often being inverted to suit a prescribed pathway. 

If contemporary dance exists to reflect our world back at us, Stage of Being is achieving that goal.

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