KEY POINTS:
Footnote Dance is an enigmatic national treasure. For more than two decades, in the capable and enthusiastic hands of founder and artistic director Deirdre Tarrant, it has nurtured and inspired a wealth of dance, choreographic and musical talent.
Almost all our leading lights in the dance have done a spin with Footnote: Shona McCullough, Raewyn White and Michael Parmenter, who is this year's Forte Season artist and whose beautiful mandala of a work, Bhakti, opens the current programme.
Moss Paterson is another choreographer with a long history with Footnote and his Kokowai, which premiered in Feats of Fancy last year, looks good on its second showing.
Malia Johnston is a serious talent and long-term Footnote contributor, whose intense Broken By Design concludes the current programme, with the dancers gasping for breath spreadeagled on the floor.
Tim Fletcher evokes a realistic discomfort in his The Chicken or the Lamb, about the strange world of long-haul flights. Julia Sadler's Match is a snappy red and black study of one-upmanship.
Why then does this season of contemporary dance from an established, earnest and honourable company, which always produces a stable of intelligent and well-trained dancers to offer up to an interesting mix of choreographers, fail to set our little dance world on fire?
Made in New Zealand, like many a Footnote season that has gone before, is solid, worthy but lacking in excitement despite the total commitment of its six young dancers.
Original music for all but Bhakti should have added more than a frisson of spice. The traditional Maori instruments in the Paddy Free/Richard Nunns composition for Kokowai are lovely, and Eden Mulholland, long time collaborator with Johnston, can always create an epic sound score.
But no one will be rushing out to buy the Made In New Zealand CD.
Tarrant's contribution to the proceedings is a work called Around the World in Wellington with original music by Stephen Gallagher. A series of read stories reflect our increasingly cosmopolitan primary school population, while the dancers try to mime the actions and hold up a representation of planet Earth.
It is, frankly, choreography for children - Tarrant's honourable forte -but does nothing for a situation that needs a more sophisticated spark.
