TAPAC, Tempo° Dance Festival
October 8 | Reviewed by Renee Liang

THIS multidisciplinary work, featuring collaboration between dancers, graphic artists, videographers, lighting designers and dance researchers, provided a challenging platform for nascent dancers from AUT University’s Bachelor of Dance program, about to graduate its first crop. The nearly sold-out performance generated vigorous discussion and debate at the after-performance Q+A, where lecturers and students answered questions about their working processes.

For me as a non-dance person, watching this performance stimulated reflection on the process of creation. Dancers create with their bodies and motion, therefore “dance research” is a fluid and constantly kinetic process. I hope I don't sound too much like a philistine if I admit that this form of research is a new concept to me, used as I am to research being done with words and numbers that at least stay still. But movement can occur in as many individual ways as there are dancers. The show – a dialogue between three very different dance pieces – also engaged the concept of conformity versus individuality.

Kathleen-Malee Smith’s Through the Looking Glass, a classically-based reflection on creative endeavour, provided a moving spectacle of this tussle. In front of a screen onto which the written words of each dancer were projected, individuals broke away, performed brief solos and then united in clusters of conforming movements. I found the work graceful and engaging with the personalities of the individual dancers coming through, though having the sometimes long poems projected behind them was a little distracting.

In Philippa Pidgeon’s piece, Figural Patterns, the dialogue between the individual and the group was taken one step further. Although the base inspiration for this piece came from Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland’s solid and famously porky granite figures, I was reminded more of molecular interactions, with groups of bodies forming bonds, spinning off to influence other groups and forming dynamic stage patterns. The lithe young dancers – uniformly dressed in black but expressing their individuality even more in this piece than in the last – in no way physically resembled Vigeland’s figures, but did manage to communicate something of the sense of community and interaction that his sculptures represent.

Jennifer Nikolai’s piece motion.stop.motion took the concept of individuality versus conformity the furthest. Choreographed to a hip hop compilation by no doubt famous-to-the-young artists DJ Unk and Dizzy Rascal, it was a refreshing shock after the classically-inspired music and dance styling of the previous two pieces. 35 young dancers (applause to Jennifer for even contemplating that number of dancers on a stage that size) filled the stage in a stamping fluorescent tangle, their costumes and movements reflecting the strange conviction youth have always had that they are being original by copying everybody else. Each dancer had a fleeting moment of individual gesture and fame before being swallowed once again by the crowd. Their movements were delightfully complemented by a video projection, shot in blurry neon images on Queen St and K’Rd, by Moana Nepia and Andrew Denton. This piece contained one very striking concept, that of “silent sound”: every individual dancing in the same space to the same soundtrack, but the beat unheard by outsiders. I would be interested in seeing a performance where all of the dancing is silent, accompanied by a soundtrack heard only in the dancer’s head. It could be a metaphor for so many things, most immediately (for me) the creative process.

All in all, for this non-dancer, going to see this show was much more thought-provoking and enjoyable than I had anticipated, and kudos to the staff and students of AUT University for the hard work in making it happen.

» Image courtesy of Wendy Cain