Performance: Boneflute Ivi Ivi

Maidment Theatre

Review: Bernadette Rae

Lemi Ponifafio's singular fascination is with life and death, but mostly death as in ancestors, spirit and the underworld.

His background in Butoh - a painstakingly slow and tortured dance form from Japan - is ideally suited to his subject.

High jinks and levity are not high on the list of expectation. Rich imagery and bodies in potent motion are.

Boneflute Ivi Ivi satisfies performer with some dramatic staging. A shallow pool centre stage, with two rocky outcrops that are almost human in form, contain for long minutes a motionless, chalk-white and naked figure that eventually breathes, twitches and stretches experimentally in a graphic reflection of foetal life.

A tall, elegant figure retrieves an eel trap from the pool and over several more long minutes produces very real and very live eels from within.

A tangle of human bodies later fills the pool like writhing eel spawn or the beginning of life itself.

But at other times the lighting is so subtle that the onstage action, if there is any, is invisible.

Stiff, Polynesian style garments that often conceal the dancers from armpit to ankle also obliterate much of the fine detail of movement and physical expression.

Then, a five-minute passage by one dancer over three stage metres becomes an exercise in tedium. It was too much for a significant number of people last night. They walked out.

For others the soundtrack, ranging from primordial roar, through vibrant cricket song and tropical rainfall, punctuated with more formal tracks of Polynesian drums, is evocative and meaningful enough on its own.

Boneflute Ivi Ivi obviously picks up on Ponifafio's last work, but for those who hit the Wintergarden last time, there might have been a disappointing sense of deja vu at this show's conclusion.

The climax, building from darkness towards a brilliant light shafting through a half-closed door, and the dancing pom poms of flame are beautiful - but a less-than-satisfying conclusion second time around.