Best Foot Forward 2003 at the Dorothy Winstone Centre

By BERNADETTE RAE

Footnote Dance Company is an important and rare institution in New Zealand - our only fulltime contemporary dance company. Its backbone is the work it does in the nation's schools, and it has long acted as a nurturing ground for emerging dancers and choreographers.

Its annual performances are always a mixed bag, as former members return with choreographic offerings and a troupe of new youngsters performs.

This year Moana Nepia, Moss Peterson and Guy Ryan are the returnees with Raewyn Hill, one of the country's biggest talents, also contributing a new work. Katie Burton and company dancer Jacob Sullivan round out the programme with a work apiece.

It is an ambitious lineup for just five dancers, with some of them on stage for the whole performance. The pace throughout tends to the frenetic edge of fast, the physicality is demanding and they meet that challenge with energy, enthusiasm and well-disciplined natural talent.

But there is a strange lack of connection in most of the works. Moana Nepia's Inside Edge displays the remarkable leaps and extensions of Steven Watson, with some complex lifts and fancy phrases all competently performed. But there is a distinct air of bodies going through their super-flexible paces with a strange lack of connection with the meaning of the work.

The trend continues until it seems the dancers are not actually connected to themselves. The movements are almost exclusively performed from the outside in - from the extremities of fingers and toes instead of unfolding from the centre, from the core.

Of the five, only Robin Jung seems to have an instinctive feel for this necessary grounding. For the rest it is an arms and legs exercise only.

That is, until the finale. Hill's beautiful In Time of Flight offers the most lyrical music of the evening, by Nick McGowan, and the music gives the work - and the dancers - a flow. Despite the title, it also uses far more earth-based movements, restricting the opportunities for extravagant extensions.

Hill also demands more passion, more risk - and the result is that the dancers bravely reveal a little more of themselves.