Touch Compass, which aims to change the way New Zealanders think about dance and who can dance, has received $6000 from the Wellington City Council towards its Wellington Triple Bill premier from 9 to 11 June.
 
Based in Auckland, Touch Compass performs professional productions integrating dancers with and without disabilities. Its Triple Bill performances follow a performance at the Hawke’s Bay Opera House in Hastings on Saturday 4 June.
 
In its 14 years of operation, Touch Compass has astounded audiences in New Zealand and Australia with its choreography and aerial work, which sees wheelchairs and dancers performing suspended above the stage as well as on it.
 
Touch Compass first performed Triple Bill in Auckland last year with a sell-out season. Jack Gray from Theatre Review said the show featured “strong choreographic work that could sit anywhere in the world from London to New York”.  New Zealand Herald reviewer Raewyn Whyte called the show “sophisticated, technically and emotionally challenging integrated dance works. The eight Touch Compass dancers are artistically assured, responding sensitively to the interpretive demands of their material, showing a high level of polish and proficiency, and a new level of maturity as an ensemble.”
 
Triple Bill presents three large-scale performance works by internationally acclaimed New Zealand choreographers, Jeremy Nelson (Six) and Carol Brown (Slip), and one of the highlights of the Tempo New Zealand Festival of Dance 2008, Grotteschi choreographed by Suzanne Cowan. Slip received a 2010 New Zealand Listener Arts Touchstone Award.
 
Its professional leadership and choreography have led to Touch Compass’s participation in Creative New Zealand’s Totara Arts Leadership Programme. From 2012, the company will receive annual funding.
 
Touch Compass is a charitable trust. Its vision is of a society where all people are highly valued, and where disabled and non-disabled dancers of all cultures seamlessly integrate in contemporary dance programmes that resonate profoundly with audiences.
 
Triple Bill features at the Hawke’s Bay Opera House, Hastings on 4 June and Te Whaea: National Dance and Drama Centre in Wellington from Thursday June 9 to Saturday June 11. You can book at TicketDirect 0800 224 224 | www.ticketdirect.co.nz

Dancers:
Grotteschi: Suzanne Cowan and Adrian Smith
Six: Daniel King, Julia Milsom, Catherine Chappell, Alisha McLennan, Suzanne Cowan and Adrian Smith
Slip, I’m not falling, I’m just hanging on for as long as you hold me: Kerryn McMurdo, Jesse Johnston-Steele. Julia Milsom, Daniel King, Alisha McLennan, Catherine Chappell

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