Performance: 3D Dance Package

By BERNADETTE RAE

MAIDMENT THEATRE, Auckland - The miracle of Touch Compass Dance Trust, whose mixed-ability dancers come in just about every sort of body imaginable - from the most supple and sound to the incredibly vulnerable, is that on the night each of those bodies and the movements they produce seems perfect.

Unconditionally.

Lusi's Eden is described as a pilot work for potential future development, but sparkles in this programme alongside offerings from Curve and Auckland Dance Company, like a precious gem, polished and flawless and brilliantly lit from the heart within.

At one point two very able-bodied dancers perform a gorgeous duet in and around and up and down a rope suspended from above. Moments earlier, Lusi Faiva, a dancer with severe cerebral palsy, stuns the audience with her overhead flight - of freedom, fantasy and fulfilment.

Two guys play out an hilariously macho drinking scene. The one with the perfect comic timing is Jesse Steele. Jesse has Down's syndrome.

The work is about Lusi's dream, formed as a very small girl trapped not only in an unresponsive body but in the bareness of a bedroom in her foster home. Pretty dresses, girly things on a dressing table, her very own party were once a world away.

Now just watch that Lusi swing!

Touch Compass is great theatre, great dance, and real succour for the soul. And I nominate Catherine Chappell, its inspirational force, for a double MBE.

Before that we saw a reworked version of Curve's initially innovative Five Girls Called Doris. It has doubled in length, to almost an hour, which is too much of a singularly good thing by far and delivers a veritable overdose of the accompanying "sound design" by Charlotte 90.

Auckland Dance Company presented its commemorative work Gallipoli - a pedestrian piece of dance prose with much melodramatic posturing from the dancer called Maaka - and a collaboration with the Guy Ryan Company, called White Noise. The latter was plain impenetrable, with distracting, stumpy costumes - and with more macerated music from Charlotte 90.