Black Grace Verses

Dancer’s journey captivates

Nelson Mail review by Naomi Arnold

Black Grace’s artistic director and choreographer Neil Ieremia, started the contemporary dance company in 1995, and I now spends much of its time touring overseas to rave reviews. This series of shows is a rare chance to reconnect with New Zealand audiences.

Verses is split into eight short works, each inspired by a song, story or snatch of poetry from Ieremia’s life. He appears on stage between each piece, chatting to the audience, explaining the work’s origins and introducing the dancers.

It’s an intimate journey through memories of, and reflections upon, his life so far, set to contemporary music important to him – from hip-hop to Radiohead.

Though it almost seems unfair to choose favourites, a particular standout was the opening group pati pati, a Polynesian-influenced piece where the dancers used their bodies as percussion to weave a hypnotic pattern of rhythm, movement and breath.

Just as affecting was the fourth, a beautifully controlled piece set to Johnny Cash’s epitaph-like version of Nine Inch Nails ‘Hurt’. The dancers started and ended in stark silence, with just the sound of skin squeaked across polished wood; but in between they seemed the ultimate expression of Cash’s song – gritty and pained, constricted by mounting tension and emotion barely leashed.

Black Grace veteran Sean McDonald dances solo in the seventh verse, Do Not Go Gentle, set to David Bowie and Queen’s Under Pressure. Aptly, it deals with the slow breaking down of an ageing dancer. Once so powerful and reliable, the use-by date on a dancer’s body is short, Ieremia explains beforehand.

The final verse, Totem began with red-lit sculpture of bodies, set to Little Bushmen’s Karanga, and as the lights came up on the dancers and they unfolded themselves, they seemed to recall the beginnings of the world itself.

The piece soon moved into a grunty piece set to Steve Ray Vaughan’s rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child. It all ended all too soon. Though each individual piece is quite different, as a whole Verses is a captivating marriage of rhythm, poise and physicality – at once precise and relentlessly staunch.