Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Rage Rage
Black Grace, Company B
Hunua Room
Aotea Centre
Until June 5
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
For Black Grace’s “Rage Rage” the Aotea Centre’s Hunua Room was set up with a high catwalk built through the centre of the space.
Was this nod to Dylan Thomas’s “Rage rage against the dying of the light” or a personal rage of Neil Ieremias. His work has always had an element of the personal and the political with works which are confrontational both between the performers themselves and between performers and audience.
Up to a couple of dozen performers race around the stage, in waves of massed groups, performing a series of linked dances to a range of music from traditional Samoan to contemporary rap.
Like all Ieremia’s shows this was a high energy and relentless performance combining many of the elements of his previous explorations in dance.
There is the hand clapping, foot stomping, the falls / collapses, hand movements like a form of deaf signing and arms used as a kind of semaphore.
The various sequences are introduced by Strictly Brown founders Leki Jackson-Bourke and Saale Ilaua who reminisce about their time at school, favourite TV and films and playground games. These reminiscences lead the company into surges of movement.
The sounds are a mixture of the traditional and the modern as the dancers negotiate issues of the present which are rooted in the past. Some of these are addressed in the latter part – Covid, climate change and the future of Tuvalu.
Many of routines seem based on the schoolyard ‘game’ of Rush, some of which morph into fights or just dissipate.
The final sequence is a mix of despair and celebration danced to a nihilistic vocal soundtrack-
“I don’t belong here
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here”
With the refrain
You don’t belong here
Which encapsulates so .much feeling and emotion focused on the emptiness of contemporary life.
Like much of Black Grace dances there is a tension and drama created by the action and reaction, between rapid movement and calm, between a zombie-like state and intense animation.
Throughout the performances there is an awareness of the beauty and intensity of the dance and the strange conflicting visceral and abstract nature of the dancing which underlines Ieremia’s ability to create dance which is focused and potent
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