Surface by Black Grace at the Sky City Theatre

By BERNADETTE RAE

Black Grace shows its dark side in artistic director Neil Ieremia's intense new work. Inspired by the traditional tattoo, the pe'a, recently chipped into Ieremia's 64-year-old father's skin from waist to knee, Surface also reflects Ieremia's consideration of his Samoan culture.

Ieremia is talking a lot, lately, of a new awareness of "what he is not", and of a definite expansion of his cultural identity.

On the surface, Surface looks and sounds Samoan. Backscreens project images that could be tattoo marks or tapa cloth patterns, with Samoan words emblazoned high.

The colours are all organic, brown, black, red and ochre and all the variations of skin tones that come between. The soundtrack pulsates with the rhythmic clank and chipping of the tattoo instruments, enlivened with snatches of piano music.

The work is structured after four separate elements of the pe'a. But there is an edge to this Samoan body of dance; the Black Grace dancers leap, fly, collide, explode, ignite and bleed it into being in a way that has not been there before.

It comes in the form of several striking images outside Ieremia's previous, rich but fairly exclusively Pacific Island repertoire.

There is the shock of the upside-down man, Ieremia himself; the stunning effect of mouth-held lights; the inclusion of huge river stones that add voluptuous curves to the linear patterns of the tattoo, and represent the female form as well as a New Zealand landscape. Multiple references to pohutukawa trees, rather than palms, speak of a new, heartfelt home.

And there is the implication that a tattoo, though worn on the surface, finds its meaning in far deeper layers of experience, while acknowledging the opposite: that the ever-changing surface also alters what is within.

Ieremia's inner man has obviously been through a crisis in the last while and his choreography expresses that, in a complexity and a portent of passion.

Surface is preceded by a restaging of Ieremia's 2002 work, Human Language, in which he first included the female dancers, an important addition to the company in Surface.

Human Language is as sharp as citrus, sweet as mango, pretty as pawpaw and an ideal entree.