Review: Nostalgia at Aotea Centre

The play Nostalgia. Photo / Supplied

There's no doubt about it: Nostalgia is spectacular. With a well-drilled cast of 26, an array of clever sets and a great use of space, Japan's Ishinha company presents "people at the mercy of the turbulent [20th] century" with visual panache.

Their dance theatre piece with surreal edges follows two immigrants to Brazil – a Japanese man and a Portuguese woman – through revolution, persecution, flight and war.

Nostalgia has the high production values, detailed costumes and dramatic plot points – birth, death, rape – of a rock opera. The cast shouts in rhythmic call-and-response style (in Japanese) over the repetitive electronic soundtrack composed by Kazuhisa Uchihashi in a style reminiscent (to western ears) of Philip Glass.

However, unlike rock opera which relies mostly on song lyrics to tell the tale, Nostalgia focuses on movement, particularly the intricate rearranging of groups performing a sort of angular hip hop.

But in spite of the optical extravaganza, something is missing: epic storytelling needs small, personal moments to balance the grandiose elements. Instead, the audience is kept at arm's length and the piece sometimes feels distant and remote.

The lack of character development of Nostalgia's central couple keeps the piece from being entirely satisfying; yet their nature as ciphers would have worked had fantastical aspects been enlarged at the expense of more literal depictions of protest riots and refugee trains.

For me, these more imaginative scenes were the most enjoyable: a desert of tattered flags showing what's left of nations once their battle dust settles; a sad giant, the spectre of the past, who's lost his bowler hat; a flock of crows, not in the jungle but on a jungle gym, foreshadowing what's to come for one of the playground's other denizens; a joyful map-reading which is later echoed mournfully, mechanically, by exiles.

Hope turns to drudgery – but what beautiful drudgery it is to behold.