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 New Zealand's most acclaimed dancers and choreographers, is in hospice care with terminal cancer.
His final work, M_Nod will be seen by Wright afficionados 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, the movement managed to express deeply oppositional emotions at the same time.
