Reviews of Ngai Tahu 32
REVIEW: Ngai Tahu 32 at Ten Days on the Island, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, 3 - 5 April 2009
Written by Kylie E Eastley for Australian Stage and arts@work’s Critical Acclaim program .
Saturday, 04 April 2009
In the centre of the stage is a long rectangular shallow pool of water. Beneath the surface we can see the traditional Maori lattice patterns (tukutuku) that tile the submerged runway. A woman enters singing the Maori call of welcome (karanga); beautiful and haunting the figures emerge. A man and woman are positioned in the centre of the stage. He is older, a big strong man. She is like a china doll, pale face in a heavy black Victorian gown. The pool they traverse runs from upstage to downstage and behind them is a projection of watery images.
The ominous but inevitable story of a man traveling from life to death begins in a tale of personal and cultural history, loss and maybe even regret. The focus is drawn to centre stage where the lighting and movement are strengthened by the backstage projections that merge into the onstage figures. The versatile cast depicted their characters through dance, song and acting to collectively create a sense of struggle and loss.
This beautiful production is a layering of well considered elements that combine to create a haunting and richly textured experience for audiences. The movement of the performers sets a steady slow pace that continues throughout this one hour production.
Haunting traditional vocals interlaced with contemporary sounds begin as a mound of fishing nets unravel to reveal a young woman who emerges and dances in unison with a young man on the opposite side of the stage. The strength, drumming and fire of the Maori culture is contrasted with the conservatism of Colonialism through the costuming, use of props and the music. Heavy ropes, water and a carried suitcase reflect a journey with characters intersecting and exiting the stage. Costume design by Elizabeth Whiting is exquisite and used effectively to accentuate the characters and context of the piece.
While NGAI TAHU 32 depicts a Maori story, there is room for interpretation. This work engages the imagination and our own personal reflections of culture and history. There are so many breathtaking moments in this atmospheric and intoxicating work. Undulating between trauma and bliss, it effectively includes all elements of stage design and a collection of dance genres from ballroom to the Maori haka. The characters are committed and intense in their movements.
NGAI TAHU 32 is choreographed by Maori artist, Louise Potiki Bryant who performs along with a cast of eight dancers. Established in 2000, the company has a strong focus on exploring and retelling traditional New Zealand stories and legends. In this production they accomplish this through the use of new technology, innovative set design and contemporary dance and performance.
This Australian Premiere is realized through a dramatic, theatrical interpretation that draws the audience into a world of dream. Its inclusion in Tasmania’s premiere arts festival, Ten Days on the Island 2009, provides an insight for audiences into New Zealand dance and story telling.
Excerpts from review by Francesca Horsley for the NZ Listener
ATAMIRA Dance Company’s Ngai Tahu 32 was magnetic from its opening moments in the Town Hall Concert Chamber. A black stream of water with tukutuku patterns, projected from above, stretched lengthwise along the theatre floor……
……Although the work ended in renewal, it was deeply elegiac. Te Ata, dark shape shifters danced alongside the stream, a kuia passed on her wisdom to her granddaughter, the survival of the wairua was never assured. The music by Paddy Free (Pitch Black) carried grief, the sea, voices speaking assuredly of whakapapa. Potiki-Bryant’s clever video suggested waterfalls, ferns, faces and soft turning hands. The dancers, in and out of cold water on a cold night, performed without a shiver…… mastery of singular images was assured; and told from the heart, the story was mesmeric, powerful and moving.
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Bi-Cultural work healing, faultless - reviewed by Jennifer Shennan for Dominion Post
ATAMIRA Dance Company is performing at Te Whaea all this week. One school matinee is already sold out, but bookings for the public season are reportedly low. That’s a true puzzle because the Auckland based Atamira always delivers quality goods, but this performance is as beautiful, tender, sad, healing and consoling as any testament to whatever you want the term “bi-cultural” to mean in the country you live in.
Some politicians will tell you it’s “this”, other politicians will tell you it’s “that”, (provided you vote for them of course). But this work is a weave of movement, song, sculpture, light, tukutuku and whakapapa that conveys the personal reality. It documents the chapter and verse of one life, Ngai Tahu 32 as he was known, but that spills forward into a future vision, and backward where a huge history of 19th and 20th centuries shapes the view.
Every aspect of the stunningly designed production works to perfection. Waimihi Hotere’s waiata spans several generations, scooping up Ana Hato (and a hint of Billie Holliday) as she goes.
Louise Potiki Bryant’s choreography sounds the depths of sad loss, but allows a glimmer of hope that it may yet turn and rise. There is a hint of Keri Hulme’s world of The Bone People, and a shimmer of Ralph Hotere’s vision in several projected images. The cut and thrust of gestures belongs to the world of haka, wero and wiri.
Justine Hohaia’s performance as Te Wairua is as fine and faultless as the moko chiseled, no doubt, on her great grandmother’s chin – an exquisite cameo that should earn her accolades. Justine is one of the consistently calm and focused dancers that gives this company its continuing strength.
Atamira deserves funding for a national tour of every marae that wants them. Several of the images have been borrowed form the tukutuku panels and sees woven there, making the performance ideally tailored to a whare whakairo.
Let’s really get this one right and seize the moment – rather than wait 12 months and watch talented dancers leave the country for work abroad. The show would actually do very well in Berlin and New York, equally as Suva and Noumea, but one step at a time.
Beyond the Veil of Darkness into the World of Light - reviewEd by Moana Nepia for DANZ Magazine
ATAMIRA Dance Company’s first full-length production, Ngai Tahu 32 by Louise Potiki-Bryant, premiered at Tempo Dance Festival.
House doors opened on a vast, dimly lit space. Figures lay still, silent in a long narrow pool. A karanga pierced the silence breathing life into the performance. Figures moved and stirred, drawn towards one another, and into a series of movement tableaux that enacted fragments of a specific history and whakapapa contained within a file titled Ngai Tahu 32, which provided the starting point and structural basis for this work. Bryant’s ancestor Wi Potiki, was a Ngai Tahu rangattira who signed the deed of sale of the Otago block and also Kemps purchase, where a tenth of the land was also to be kept as reserve for Ngai Tahu. This promise was never kept.
Bryant’s ongoing inter-disciplinary practice aims for a poetic balance between visual and choreographic elements. Researching her own tribal history gives this work a thematic strength matching that of earlier work such as her video Whakaruruhau in which a similar sculptural austerity also reinforced the feeling of an extended eulogy or lament. Motifs from previous works, set design, projections, lighting, and choreographic patterning drawn along a linear trajectory, articulated Maori ideas of past, present and future as a fluid spatio-temporal continuum.
The pool acted as a pathway through time from beyond the veil of darkness into the world of light. As one life receded, another came forth. Reflections of light patterned kowhaiwhai and tukutuku bounced off water and onto the ceiling, further inviting reference to how Maori visual patterning often integrates themes of continuity and genealogy within abstract forms. Haka and gestural elements from Maori dance coloured a restrained movement vocabulary that sought to convey aspects of despair, dashed hopes and perseverance in the face of adversity.
Maaka Pepene’s dramatic potential as the main protagonist, found fullest expression in some intense solo material as Wi Potiki, his son Ihaia, and great-grandson Alexander Waitutu Bryant, the choreographer’s paternal grandfather. Women performers including Dolina Wehipeihana, Justine Hohaia, Cathy Livermore and Corinna Hunziker, were all quietly dignified, yet strong accompanying voyagers on this journey through time. Waimihi Hotere’s singing and appearance seemed to herald a new dawning or awakening. An abrupt ending came way too soon. We should eagerly await the next chapter.
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples for National Business Review
The inspiration for Ngai Tahu 32 comes from a file held by the Maori Land Court, which contains information on the Whakapapa of Wi Potiki, who signed the deed for the sale of the Otago block in the 1840s. The programme notes describe the work as “one man’s journey through time and whakapapa to deliver a soul to a new generation.”
While this may have been the starting point for the work, it becomes a remarkably complex and multi-layered piece providing intersecting narratives and concepts about the individual, family, cultural history and the birth and evolution of ideas.
For the performance a shallow trough of water a metre wide ran the length of the auditorium, with the audience seated on either side of the room.
Most of the dancing occurred within this strip of water, with individual dancers passing up and down the space. Others were led or carried and in one case a huge coil of rope become a funeral cart which was dragged through the water bearing a figure.
The performance opens with figures draped in the water and other figures standing in it, stark symbols of primal forces emerging from the waters of history. The strip of water provided a tight passage in which the dances operated and became a metaphorical conduit for the passage of history and ideas.
The passing along the water channel was like the journey through life and took on mythical overtones of the passage from the visible world into another, recalling the journey across the River Styx and the leap from Cape Reinga.
The performance was a creative blending of various musical forms, traditional dance, contemporary dance and dance forms of Maori the haka, karanga and waiata.
Much of the dancing was minimalist, with slight gestures of hand and limb playing as important a role as the more dramatic movements. There were also sequences of great energy and physicality. In one, a superbly contrived sequence, a dancer turns the lurchings and quiverings of a drunken man into a set of flowing movements.
This sequence was accompanied by the dancers enunciating a series of numbers which recalled the eerie number counting passages of the Philip Glass opera, Einstein on the Beach, a work which had several connections with Ngai Tahu 32.
Following the “death” of this character he performs a “resurrection” with a rich willowy dance in which the body unfolds like a fern frond symbolizing evolution into another state.
The dancers also worked within a dream environment where much of the movements were pared back and slowed down like the movement in a slow-motion film.
While there were few props, those they had were used effectively.
In one of the opening sequences a woman attired in black Victorian garb walks along the channel of water trailing a vast scarf. Only when it has been fully extended and unfurled do we discover it is actually a fishing net and it contains a curled up woman who then slowly folds herself into a suitcase in a beautifully composed sequence echoing ideas of mystery, loss and self-denial.
The performance was filled with a number of fine symbolic sequences as when one of the dancers writes in the water with a feather quill and another flicks coins across the water.
