KEY POINTS:
PERFORMANCE
What: Touch Compass 10th Anniversary Season
Where and when: Maidment Theatre, Oct 17-20
What: Footnote Forte Season 2007
Where and when: SkyCity Theatre, Oct 16
Touch Compass, a bold venture that 10 years ago introduced to New Zealand the concept of integrated dance - as in able-bodied and differently abled performing together - is in celebratory mood.
A glossy new book charts what is now the Touch Compass Dance Trust's extraordinary history. And a retrospective programme, celebrating their first decade, begins its national tour with performances under the Tempo dance festival umbrella.
Author Michele Powles documents the Touch Compass story, its artistic successes and its comprehensive community work, in lucid prose. She includes a detailed time-line, a gorgeous gallery of photographic images and extensive quotes from critics of the day.
Touch Compass: Celebrating Integrated Dance ($35 from www.touchcompass.org.nz) commits to record the company's significant body of dance and some of the characters who have moved us to take this brave and beautiful troupe to our hearts: like visionary magician Catherine Chappell, who has inspired the miracle. There are founding members Lusi Faiva, who neither talks nor walks with ease but communicates her joy abundantly and as a dancer flies, and Jesse Johnstone-Steele, "sure-footed, talented, professional, a gentleman and funny, very funny", who is also a Down syndrome person and a wickedly natural performer.
Inimitable comedian and TC MC Philip Patston; Tim Turner and his now deceased dog, Boiski, who had just four legs between them; Rodney Bell, now with an integrated dance company in San Francisco; and Tess Connell, Sumara Fraser, Matt Gibbons, Bronwyn Hayward, Julia Milson, Eden Mulholland, Guy Ryan, Dolina Wehipeihana, Suzanne Cowan, Malia Johnston, Alisha McLennan, and a host of others, leave their indelible mark on the book's glossy pages.
No one who has enjoyed a Touch Compass performance or appreciated the value of its community classes will want to miss out on a copy.
The Touch Compass 10th Anniversary Season programme features Lusi's Eden, which premiered in 2001 and was chosen, says artistic director Chappell, because it is celebratory in nature and honours its heroine, who has an important role in the company.
Johnstone-Steele's status is also honoured in a new aerial work, yet to be named, which looks at altered perceptions, primarily as in short and tall.
There will also be a new structured improvisation, by Felicity Molloy, using elements of traditional Touch Compass warm-ups and trainings. Hephaestus and Ares, choreographed by Suzanne Cowan, Malia Johnston's Spoke and two films, Union and The Picnic complete the programme.
Johnston is also the featured choreographer in Footnote Dance's Forte Season 2007, that annually celebrates the work of one outstanding choreographer.
She has reworked her highly successful Miniatures but just enough to suit the solo passages to Footnote dancers and is presenting Broken by Design, which premiered in the Footnote Made season earlier this year.
While Miniatures is an exquisite piece, with dancers performing in, on and around a selection of small contained spaces, "exploring the beauty that comes with the small things in life", Broken by Design is a "gut-buster", exploding with energy.
"All the material was developed with a partner - and then we took the partner away," Johnston says.
"It reflects on separation and came after other work I was developing at the time, which looked at the aftershock of separation, the impact of that on the physical body." Johnston has a long-standing professional partnership with composer Eden Mulholland and Broken by Design also reflects their new working process.
"I used to to make work and Eden would be away. His writing brain only came on at night."
A 10-day workshop designed to shift working processes changed all that. "Eden had to come in at 10am and work with me all day.
"It was quite frustrating for him at first. But he is used to it now and has become efficient at making the music in the moment.
"It is amazing, more intuitive. And we get the music earlier."
