Performance: Dance in the Raw

Unitec Dance Studio 2

Review: Bernadette Rae

Passion for contemporary dance is what drives the eight feisty performers who make up biped productions and who completed their five-city North Island studio tour in Auckland this weekend.

It was that palpable passion, pure and unadulterated, vigorous and vibrant, that illuminated their unlit and unstaged performances and it proved a more than adequate substitute for the usual theatrical artifice.

Michael Parmenter, one of the country's leading lights of dance, was there as a special guest, performing a love duet in one of the excerpts from Lyne Pringle's extensive choreography Kilt. He was teamed with Anna MacRae whose ankle was bandaged but she flew and threw Parmenter around, undaunted.

Pringle, celebrating her status as a mature dancer and a cohort of Parmenter, proved she is still able to hold a difficult count and keep jig pace with the younger ones. Natasha Alpe, Justine Hohaia, Jackie Gray and Georgina White are young talents who bring hope for the future of the country's contemporary dance.

But Megan Adams was the brightest star. The performance began with a public warm-up and Adams was there from the beginning, an energetic force who captured the eye immediately.

She did not appear in Gray's piece, initially called Birds of Paradise but which is in such a state of evolution that for this performance it was nameless.

But she whirled and whipped and raged through all three sections of Pringle's Girlie Suite, choreographed a complex and rhythmical palindrome that followed and was still there, fast and furious, funny, and fit, in the final Kilt.

What a dancer! What a performance! Mega-passion!