Auckland Arts Festival review: I Am, Aotea Centre

I Am performers present a kaleidoscope of images both terrible and entrancing.

Spellbinding Mau work uses Kiwi artist’s iconic painting and war imagery in heart-stirring salute to the fallen.

Activism through art specialist Lemi Ponifasio and Mau take Colin McCahon's iconic painting as a huge and architectural backdrop to their spellbinding tribute to the fallen of World War I - and take its subtitle Victory Over Death 2 to the very heart.

The giant image emerges magically from a tilting back panel that initially portrays a darkly monochromatic abstract which could be the geological strata of an ancient earth trench and, at work's end, a climactic torrent of waterfall that fails to completely obliterate the dreadful detritus of what has gone before.

A crackly rendition of the national anthem is prelude and plea. "God of nations ... hear our voices ... guard Pacific's triple star ... "

In Ponifasio's context, so far removed from the football stadiums and their cartoonesque wars, where we most frequently hear them today, the words deliver their true and deadly meaning. There are other prayers and incantations, delivered with passion in 10 other Pacific tongues. And the shrieks and agonised cries need no translation.

A constant soundscape of dark sound, frequently loud enough to quiver the stalls, rumbles and blasts the language of war, its weaponry and the constant anger that holds the human heart to such terrible hostage.

Image 1 of 21: Group F perform Skin of Fire as part of the Auckland Arts Festival. Photo / Michael Craig

Against all this Mau people - clad in black and sometimes white, occasionally in garments with a military mien, or naked - shuffle, float, flex and flail, fight, surrender, suffer, somehow survive in a kaleidoscope of images both terrible and entrancing: the man who spends long minutes bending slowly back and howling till a stream of water leaks from his head; the deathly white woman rendered mannequin bald with torn lips and ripped eyes speaking her pain; the spitting of thick and glistening blood; the little man bent to scuttle like an insect but who still dares to stand upright and look.

And all this illuminated by the most masterful of lighting, by Ponifasio's colleague in artistry, Helen Todd, whose painterly prowess would surely make McCahon proud.

I Am
Where: Aotea Centre, Auckland
When: Friday.