Contemporary dance works from New Zealand and Korea feature at arts festival

Changes
Another Letter From Earth by Neil Ieremia
Change and Constancy by Kuik Swee Boon
Auckland Arts Festival
SkyCity Theatre
Until March 19

Neil Ieremai’s latest work “Another Letter from Earth” is intended as a meditation on death, seeing it as an oppression, a suffering and a release. The dancers attempt to express these dimensions, balancing drama with introspection. The work brilliantly combines movement, lighting staging and music. The work is elaborate with elements of art installation, theatre and dance with fleeting narrative elements.

The work opened with a lament delivered by a black-clad figure, symbolising death, who then reappeared at various times through the performance, moving slowly across the stage.

Various vignettes around death were performed – a woman and her dead or dying child and a final sequence where large cutout, full-size figures of soldiers were laid out across the stage.

Much of the dance contrasted frenetic movement with refined individual dance, bodies rolling, crawling, leaping and collapsing, emphasising weight and physicality.

There was a cinematic and sculptural quality to the work with the lighting used expressively. The blazing white background occasionally went red with the dancers being silhouetted against the light. In several sequences, narrow bands of light streamed across the stage providing pathways for the dancers.

The stunning final sequence featuring the cut-outs of soldiers had a stooped figure laying a trail of black sand or human ashes around the stage. That was accompanied by individual vignettes, which built up to a mood of anxiety and despair.

The Arvo Part soundscape provided an ideal background for the dancers with its mixture of ancient and modern sounds, Unfortunately, the sound engineers had the music playing only on high volume – too loud to create a sympathetic environment

Korean choreographer Kuik Swee Boon’s “Change and Constancy” was a pared back abstract work with some individual electrifying moments.

The opening featured a dancer performing elaborate moves that seemed to be derived from martial arts. His supple movements and dramatic flourishes were danced without music, his body making almost no sound as he twisted and circled like a ghost performer.

Much of the dancing was incredibly controlled, the dancers seeming to hold their bodies in check only to have instances of explosive, fast-moving sequences intrude, with groups of dancers colliding with edgy and witty interplays.

One of the more dramatic sequences involved dancers running in circuits around the stage occasionally throwing packets of exploding coloured powder on the back wall resulting in clouds of colour but like the minimalism of the work, while captivating and rigorous, in the end felt unsatisfactory and devoid of substance.

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