Acquisitions 06 at the Auckland Concert Chamber

Touch Compass' Acquisitions 06 is at times self-indulgent but eventually hits its stride. Picture / John McDermott

Founder and artistic director Catherine Chappell has stated that Touch Compass is going through a transition stage - what she terms "adolescence" - as she attempts to withdraw from her previous position of sole power.

This programme of five short works, each by a different choreographer, and Touch Compass dancer Bronwyn Hayward's short film Beauty, bears out her observation.

Acquisitions 06 is a spotty, gawky and at times self-indulgent offering. As hilarious hero and MC Philip Patston quipped about the penultimate piece, Alexa Wilson's awful Sequential Road Kill, you could see it 10 times and still have no clue to its meaning.

"Bit like a teenager's bedroom," he said. "Things all over the floor."

Patston had a few funny things to say about Malia Johnston's offering too, titled The Big, the Bad and the Beautiful, one of the more jolly items, on a cowboy theme.

It reminded Patston of Brokeback Mountain, he said, a film which also confused him. He thought it was going to be about disabled cowboys.

If Ground Flaw by Matt Gibbons fell a bit flat - although it had some sense of form and style as a quartet - there was a good excuse.

The fifth dancer, Touch Compass's evergreen star Jesse Steel, was relegated to the audience, in a wheelchair, with a badly sprained foot. His charisma, talent and joie de vivre were certainly missed throughout and his cameo performance, on wheels, was a definite highlight of the evening.

Suzanne Cowan's Hephaestus and Ares, a duet for Daniel King and Maaka, is too angry and ugly for her stated message to emerge.

Hayward's semi-biographical Beauty is a great achievement for a determined little battler, but in the final complexity of her silk swing, just fails to soar.

But finally, with Chappell back in charge with her own work, Cellular Guide, the Touch Compass that has never failed before to touch hearts, spring tears and celebrate the human form in all its wondrous variations, is back.

They move, they meld, they convey the magic and mystery of Chappell's theme - "100 trillion cells conversing in an internal universe" - with clarity and elan.

And nobody seems more able or disabled than anybody else as they dance. 

* Acquisitions 06 is at Auckland Concert Chamber until May 7