Taste Me - The Live Series

28/06/2011 - 29/06/2011

Production Details

TASTE ME presents works by Anna Bate, Katie Burton, Celine Sumic, We Should Practice, Amy Mauvan, Natalie Clark, Georgia Giesen, SMS Collective and Ciarin Smith. Curated by Zahra Killeen-Chance and Christina Houghton.

After opening night the audience is invited to join the artists and a panel of guest speakers for the forum, “Difficult Discussions”. Focused on themes relating to choreography and curation, this is an opportunity to engage your thinking in current discourses on performance!

After the highly successful Works in Progress or WIP (DANZ interns of 2010), THE PRODUCING PROJECT – a group of multi-talented artists – was brought together to create The LIVE Series. Their aim is to support and encourage independent dance and performance artists in developing body in performance ideas.

THE PRODUCING PROJECT looks forward to presenting a show that will excite, challenge and invigorate your frozen toes.
Ward off Winter with:

THE LIVE SERIES
live choreographic dance and performance platform

TASTE ME
June Tues 28, Wed 29 @ 7.30pm
GALATOS
17 Galatos St, Auckland CBD
All tickets $10
Bookings: www.eventfinder.com (keyword The LIVE Series)

WWW.THELIVESERIES.TUMBLR.COM

Facebook keyword: The LIVE Series
Media enquiries: Lydia Zanetti 027 341 3481 / lyds.zanetti@gmail.com

THE PRODUCING PROJECT is an artist run production and curation collective facilitated by DANZ, Centre for Choreographic Research Aotearoa, Dance Studies at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, The University of Auckland and MIC Toi Rerehiko and is funded by Auckland Council. THE PRODUCING PROJECT is James Wenley, Christina Houghton, Maximus Smitheram, Rapz Maihi, Zahra Killeen-Chance and Lydia Zanetti.

2.5 hrs

Review by 30th Jun 2011

According to their project advertising, following on from the highly successful Works in Progress or WIP (DANZ interns of 2010), THE PRODUCING PROJECT brings together a group of multi-talented artists for a three-part hybrid dance exploration titled The LIVE Series. The aim is to support and encourage independent dance and performance artists in developing body-in-performance ideas. In Part 1, TASTE ME is an ensemble cast presenting works by Anna Bate, Katie Burton, Celine Sumic, We Should Practice, Amy Mauvan, Natalie Clark, Georgia Giesen, SMS Collective and Ciarin Smith. I missed the ensuing “difficult discussions” on the opening night and am therefore aware that some of the following notes may contradict resultant verbally articulated insights from there.

What I saw was a veritable feast of hybrid art – a buffet? No – we followed the menu from start to finish with a selective build towards a slowly unwinding ending. A degustation then, and one which (as much as I am about to overuse menu metaphors!), inevitably, I draw from subsequent comparisons with other recent tastes of hybrid contemporary dance works.

In an evening’s compote of tangy choreographic sensory explorations, several works featured as a distillation of an artistic brainchild recently noted in Sweaty Heart Productions of Joan of Hearts. Although she was not curator this time round, Lydia Zanetti’s pied piper antics clarified some of the same new purpose for watching dance. Her tasteful yet slightly disorienting gamboling brought the audience from one space to the next.

As with the recent Gundry Street event, off centre stage were two musicians, Jennie Cruise and Nick Wright, and once again slightly in the background of the introduction (an aperitif perhaps?) but their departure segued perfectly into three watchers seated on the floor. The first dance was possibly the most beautiful. Monkey Like Mum is an artful composition, choreographed by Amy Mauvan as a mother-daughter duet, at once sorrowful and joyous. Samantha Rawsley matched Emma Kemp in gesture and determination to prove that art and parenting can combine. This work (unless the child needed to be home a little earlier?) and the following short film, P.M.B. choreographed by Georgia. G.M. Giesen, could have been settled into the latter section of the evening ~ possibly as desert.

This is an occasion to really get to know Galatos. As much as I have reviewed or enjoyed alternative settings for dancers experimenting with their art form, I was delighted to savour the top floor and underground spaces. Works’ length gave audience plenty of time to sip the sensation of each setting as well as swallow the work. A messy start to Sunday Night Observations, choreographed by the Natalie Clark, foreshadowed a hilariously postmodern, discontinuous and a-contextual view of “normality”. Jessie McCall is the cherry on top of a slip sliding blancmange of delightful dancing bodies. Hard to see certainly in a confined space, but again I was reminded that I didn’t really have to see the work as an entirety. I could just be captivated by certain flavours.

Down stairs following a line of draped bodies (slightly reminiscent of Shona McCullagh’s recent launch… and another brief view into the backstage world of theatres) the next work a slightly less familiar group of dancers performed, Anatomy of Vanity choreographed by SMS collective. In this work, newcomer Evania Vallyon and a moody, lissom line up of dancers evoked a welcome normalcy of complex character play within the movement rather than text. There is an aesthetic difference about this work and one which deserves more rehearsal.

Back upstairs to a brief exposure to the performative world of Anna Bate. I did not have the visible benefit of seeing this work, Once More with Feeling, as it was positioned right at the top of the stairs with a crowd at my heels, so onto another hilarious offering. Lafitgua Matua, Nisha Madhan and Ilasa Galuvao successfully deconstructed a whole world of intercultural moments in Gaga: the unmentionable – a kind of Samoan flavoured disco improv trio. Katie Burton’s equally well named rendition of contemporary dance, Company, settled the movement to slow motion detail and precision, draped up and down the staircase leding to upstairs and performed to live music by Josh Tisley. On that note, the music selection for the whole evening matched but did not overpower the event and neither did the lights. Lighting mentors Ruby Reihana-Wilson and Sean Curham created a candle like ambience to push the audience’ direction sense and sensibility but cleverly, rarely exposed us.

Sombre but entirely watchable also, Celine Sumic’s recording of her live performance, Intersection, was largely successful because of gorgeously filmed Auckland road scenes. Similarly, Georgia Giesen’s tiny taster of film mentioned before in this review was revisited in the final sections of the evening with a live component. Her voluptuous body encapsulates a sort of precarious excess. Both her eloquent movements and luscious body were mesmerising to watch, though the thematic elements of staring eyes and bath time poses fitted uneasily into the otherwise cheerfully bacchalian event. These two works provoked a sense of the way conversation lulls at the end of a great evening with friends.

The Producing Project is an artist run production and curation collective facilitated by DANZ, Centre for Choreographic Research Aotearoa, Dance Studies at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, The University of Auckland and MIC Toi Rerehiko and is funded by Auckland Council. It seems fitting somehow that the first of two following events is about gustation. If TASTE ME is anything to go by I would book as soon as possible the following two performances of The LIVE Series: HEAR ME and LOVE ME. I look forward to them with relish.
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Taste Me - The Live Series

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