'Inland' at the Aotea Centre

By BERNADETTE RAE

In his previous, prolific and powerful dance theatre works, Douglas Wright has focused his extraordinarily creative talent on specifics of human experience - its burning desires, cruel confusions, terrible tragedies, and occasionally, its extreme jubilation.

In Inland he has broadened the focus to take in what American philosopher Joseph Campbell referred to as "the big stuff" - the meaning of life, of death, of consciousness itself.

Wright navigates the challenging artistic terrain with a sure hand. He has always had the vision, the intellect and the artistic sophistication, but in Inland he shows a new compassion of even the bleakest aspects of the human condition. It gives the work a huge resonance, a haunting depth, a wry humour.

Wright does not believe he will make another major work. HIV increasingly compromises his health. His personal experience gives a poignant authority to one of Inland's most striking images: a huge McCahon-esque "I" which is brightly white through most of the performance, and doubles as a farm gate, revolves to show its dark side and moves slowly into the I-shaped space awaiting it, to form a final mysterious plain of black.

Other images are unmistakably New Zealand: the projected images of blue sky and green grass and the dancers transformed to a flock of sheep.

Peta Rutter's central Shepherd character is a spoken part, but her gait and costume speak volumes, too, of the distorted masculine psyche prevalent in this lush land. Then there is Juliet Palmer's original composition, shrieking with cicadas and the frantic bleatings of the saleyards, a mixture of electronic and recorded sounds and a live violin, played by Deborah White.

And the dance? Ten superb bodies take vintage Wright choreography to near perfection.

There are frenzied outbursts, cunning cameos and images of huge drama, like the face of one dancer miraculously reborn through another's mane of dark hair.

But is the sheer magic of the movement, as distinctive to Douglas Wright as his own thumb print, that is the articulate core of the performance.

Stunning in every sense of that word.