Forever. - State Opera House, Wellington, New Zealand - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1994 by Jennifer Shennan

Douglas Wright Dance Company State Opera House, Wellington, New Zealand July 22-23, 1994 Reviewed by Jennifer Shennan

Douglas Wright's newest work, Forever, is a tour de force that drew gasps of acclaim during its 1993 premiere tour of New Zealand and proves to have lost none of its impact on its return in 1994. After filming the program for local broadcast, the company traveled to Switzerland's Bern Dance Festival in September, where it found sold-out houses and received a number of invitations to return to Europe in 1995.

Wright was a champion gymnast until, at age twenty-one, he took his first dance lessons at the Limbs studio in Auckland. After dancing with Limbs he joined the Paul Taylor company in New York City for four years, then left to work on his own choreography. Wright has created a number of short dances--most notably Knee Dance, Hey Paris, Ranterstantrum, A Far Cry, and, for Royal New Zealand Ballet, The Decay of Lying--as well as several longer works such as Now Is the Hour, As It Is, How on Earth, A Passion Play, and Gloria, all to great acclaim and some to equal controversy. Wright's guest performances in the title role of Petrouchka with Royal New Zealand Ballet in 1993 are already legendary [see Reviews/International, December 1993, page 98!. A solo, Elegy, is a poignant testament to three friends who have died of diseases stemming from AIDS. (Although he has not used the fact to headline his press releases, Wright has spoken in public of his own HIV-positive status.

The eight dancers in Forever (three women and five men, plus Wright in a cameo role) show great rapport and match each other in daring physical attack. But there is a deliberate contrast of physique as a statuesque five feet ten inches is paired alongside a diminutive five feet--a willowy gazelle alongside a stocky pony. This hallmark of Wright's casting gives the impression that, despite the dancers' phenomenal skills, they are not svelte creatures performing off in the distance but are dancing out the work on behalf of the ordinary men and women in the audience. It is this experience that I believe helps to get people onto their feet at the end of a performance.

Film sequences are ingeniously synchronized with live performance (a dancer on the screen leaps out of a window and lands on the stage) so as to blur the boundaries between what is real, here, now, and what is imagined, feared, in the future, between what you think is a lesion on your body and what your friends tell you will probably go away--between what Emily Dickinson felt as a funeral in her brain and what a mad hatter's tea party in the afterlife might be like.

The young men use physical strength to test and taunt each other. They -experiment and compete; they steal each other's girlfriends. Neil leremia, a Samoan, performs a fast fa'ataupati, a traditional Samoan dance with virtuosic body-slapping providing the musical accompaniment. The dance proves a near showstopper, and of course he wins the girl.

The men hurtle their bodies through the air like players in pursuit of a soccer ball that isn't there. They seem like sparring partners until, later, they start to gang up on one man whose sexual orientation is different from their own. On film, the showers in a changing room are portrayed as the very temple of erotic temptation; the beauty of the bodies is breathtaking, whatever your own tastes.

Some fairly relentless behavior ensues, and there is a blackly comic edge to the eventual survival of this antihero, danced by Taiaroa Royal (the most powerful and enduring Maori contemporary dancer in the country). He becomes a transvestite nightclub entertainer, triumphantly castrated, and takes refuge on the film screen, where his tormentors can no longer reach him.

There were howls of embarrassed and relieved laughter as New Zealand audiences recognized the gender stereotyping and homophobic behavior that has been known in this sparsely populated country. Maori and Polynesian dances are also used in ways new to audiences here.

Later, a man becomes ill, is hospitalized, is tended by a diminutive but authoritative nurse, undergoes surgery, and dies of respiratory failure. All the while the most torrid, erotic, and beautiful pas de deux imaginable takes place in a half-light. The performers are Lisa Densem, perhaps the country's finest expressionist dancer, with a fragile appearance that her every movement belies, and leremia, tall and strong as a tree in a storm. Their passion is completely life-affirming.

And so is the cameo role danced by Wright to the chanted accompaniment of his fellow dancers. All his expressive conviction translates into leaps and pirouettes that he manages to do on the horizontal. He falls but is up again before he hits the ground. It suggests that gravity could be a figment of the scientist's imagination.