Tag: music

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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Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Lula Washington Dance Theatre

Aotea Centre

March 13 -16

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

The Lula Washington Dance Theatre is a contemporary modern dance company  in Los Angeles which has performed across the United States and toured internationally. It was established forty years ago when Lula Washington realised there were few black dance institutions in America  .

They have a stylish approach to contemporary dance incorporating elements of African and Caribbean dance as well as contemporary modern dance and ballet. All these elements were seen in the opening number where three dancers – Love, Faith and Hope,  performed to  heavy beats, foot stomping and clapping with the audience encouraged to add to the heavy clapping to that of the dancers and he riotous drumming morphed from African beats to something closer to hip hop.

Three female dancers were joined by male dancers who became intertwined and there was a sense of the dancers and audience all part of a church service, street performance or gym workout.

Accompanying the hectic dancing were references to American segregation, slavery, lynchings and race riots – Charleston, Springfield, Watts and an image of George Floyd

Accompanying this dancing was some relentless drumming with and  intense energy more akin to that of a night club and each of the sequences was given multiple bursts of applause from the audience.

Throughout this sequence the woman danced like ghost or departed spirits, their dancing a combination of celebration and remembrance of the African roots of the movements and music.

Because of the emphasis on these aspects the dances all seemed to be something of a political force and the dancers’ political activists.

In a later sequence one of the dancers shouts out the repeated chant “America is killing me” and this was accompanied by a visceral scream, a dramatic event one would not encounter in a Royal New Zealand Ballet performance and shows the level of the political urgency behind the Lula Washington project.

There was an intensity to many  of the dances with a physically close to that of a Whirling Dervish. But alongside this there were elements of playfulness and whimsy which were all performed with a finesse close to that of classical ballet dancers.

The political or polemical aspects of the dances often felt to be less satisfying of the performance without a dance vocabulary which did not express the angst and anger which was conveyed in the words which accompanied the dance.