Reviewed by Genevieve McClean
Drumpf and Mea Tau
If you’re looking for a show to see between tonight and Saturday you will be entertained enthralled and inspired by the two new works in development, stationed at Basement theatre as a double act.
Interdisciplinary thinking gives these works a level of provocation and satisfaction that will widen audiences and broaden the minds of the skeptical or the young.
The interaction between performers on stage is a dedicated and powerful force of play in both works. This is interdisciplinary work that dances well along those seams with language and performance, and weaves interdisciplinary thinking into the crowd.
All the dancers are infinitely watchable, and in their ownership of the basement theatre space, (black, with a single long wing you can disappear into), intensely present. Both pieces offer a poeticism intricately developed around their themes, and both occasionally deliver moments that are heartstoppingly brilliant. As they appear inside the business of the dance as well as looking out from their choreographies, the engagement is beautifully measured.
I agreed with another person leaving the building that it was ‘worth braving the weather for’, but we were talking in that slightly smug delight of treasure finders and I’m still enjoying the momentum and the melding, the melting and the mechanics. Every now and then a certain combination of people come together and are the ingredients of an alchemy of diversity, scholarship, and desire, and create a synergy, – and by that I mean sometimes the different elements come together so successfully that the show flares in a spectacle that surprises, or even you know, levitates a bit. This is one of those shows.
Drumpf meddles with expectation from the outset, but no spoilers! The musicality of breath and body sit at first in a jarring interface with the super congenial voice that plays alongside. This is a well crafted management of audience through some cognitive dissonance and into new language.
A political umbrella narrative on the whole (Drumpf we know is Donald Trump’s real sir-name thanks to John Oliver), means a world that explores dysfunction and media, operatives of horror, monster mythology, and emergence of power symbols, questioning us in any sense of propriety we might have (left) about mainstream media.
Mea Tau raises the bar for precision engineering. Opening with overtones of Coen brother, and hints of urban Auckland a troupe of four men, dance an engagement with struggle, to put it delicately, with cleverly obfuscated forces, again, no spoilers, but let’s just say the work exceeded expectations in all directions. Tight, and strict choreographies aid the manly themes in this piece, which are ultimately so much broader than you might expect. While less verbal than the previous work, I was impressed with the beauty of carefully managed rhythm, and carefully weighed choices around the use of stillness which was memorable, when there was so little of it.
Both pieces are quite different but admirable for their delicately managed grading of humour and the local vernacular against the more hearty and heady themes, and the opportunity to engage performatively in an intimate space made exhilarating for any lucky audience members who read this review in time, and get to see it.
