Footnote Dance's Forte Season annually celebrates the work of one New Zealand choreographer. This year the programme shows two works by Malia Johnston.
Miniatures comes from an earlier period in her creative journey and premiered in 2004. Previously feted, it looks even better on this latest outing.
Thestage is set, and frequently reset by the dancers, with a series of cabinets, chests and small blocks defining the main space and providing a variety of smaller "environments" - the whole dramatically, moodily and rather darkly lit by Martyn Roberts.
The dancers slither, climb, roll and fly over, through, around and on top of these various boxes, or retreat inside them for refuge, cramped containment and display. Six well-honed and infinitely skilful bodies make the most of Johnston's kaleidoscope of startling images: three curled bodies stacked vertically in three boxes, flexing anxiously; one tall figure perched precariously atop the tallest cabinet, wild movements of her arms and torso confined by firmly planted feet; four girls squatting on four small blocks in an endlessly beautiful dance of extreme poise, strength and rippling back muscles; a duet, then trio, emerging vertically from two boat-like boxes, oddly truncated; a series of wooden bricks emerging from the shadows, in staccato, like a keyboard constructing itself, with humour. Music by Johnston's long-time collaborator Eden Mulholland is a rich and inseparable component of the whole.
The second, shorter work, Broken by Design, comes from a more recent and chaotic place. The choreography hurls the six dancers across the stage at lightning speeds, cuts their progress, direction, the plane of their movement in a single screech of Mulholland's soundfest. Bodies bounce off one another, fling one another, collapse under the weight of one another, crave one another in an exercise of desperate activity and calculated imbalance.
All this dramatic power is more than matched by the power of the dancers. Hannah Elks, Anita Hunziker, Sarah Knox, Andrew Rusk, Erynne Gleeson and Jesse Wikiriwhi meet Johnston's sophisticated choreographic demands with unflagging energy and physical expression. Broken by Design was made on them in April this year, but they also make the exceptional Miniatures their own.
