Last work living epitaph
M Nod. pulls us into worlds of departed soul and a person grieving
Three deeply personal works exploring themes connected to birth and death, renewal and regeneration featured in the closing weekend of this year’s Tempo Dance Festival.
There could be no truer representation of that than Douglas Wright’s elegaic M
Nod. The extraordinary work was performed as Wright, one of our most acclaimed dancers and choreographers, was in hospice care with terminal cancer.
His final work, M Nod. will be seen by Wright aficionados as a living epitaph. It was exquisitely performed by Sean MacDonald, drawing us into the dual worlds of the recently departed soul and the newly deeply grieving living person who must go on with life, and the moments when sleeping becomes waking.
The dancing, set and costume made references to earlier Wright works exploring the imagined moments of his own death and the reactions of others to this event.
Collectively these references provided an uncanny conjuring of Wright’s own ghostly presence within MacDonald’s performance. With fragments of James Joyce, Tuvan throat singing, choral bursts from Stimmung,
fragments of live and recorded text, and movement which managed to express deeply oppositional emotions at the same time.
M Nod. was part of Between Two: New choreography by Kelly Nash and Douglas Wright, which was performed in the early evening in Q Theatre’s intimate underground Vault, juxtaposing two intense microdances in low light, each 15 minutes long. This pairing of very short works is an intriguing format which seems well-suited to Tempo programming.
Tipu, by Kelly Nash, engaged with the intense interactions around the creation, formation and bringing to life of a baby. Singer/matriarch Milly Kimberly Grant and her baby Te Whakanoa-sage were a watchful presence throughout, often standing to one side or between dancers Nancy Wijohn and Atayla Loveridge, and all the women interacted with the baby at some point.
A score by Eden Mulholland and text by PJ Harvey provide accompaniment, weaving into the movement.
Later, the superb, thoughtprovoking new Muscle Mouth work System took place within what, at first seemed, a bland, minimalist institutional room on the large stage of the Rangatira auditorium. The room, and its simple furniture, proved prison-like, the room almost taking on sentient qualities and acting as micromanaging transfer-pod for human renewal/replacement.
McCormack’s choreography and set design cleverly integrated room wizardry, with sound and AV design by Jason Wright and lighting by Natasha Wright. Powerful performances by Ross McCormack and Luke Hanna matched their physicality as shadow-selves and raised questions about the future of existence. Such rigorously developed, refined and provocative works are a welcome addition to the local scene.