The year in dance: Magic blend from the East leads way to cloud nine

The year's best moves came from Taiwan, says dance reviewer BERNADETTE RAE.

What makes good dance? The Butoh master Min Tanaka, briefly visiting in November, had plenty to say on the subject of what did not. Head of his list of destructive forces was the desire to keep to form.

"If you want to keep to form you had better stop the dance," exploded the man who is ever searching for new ways to move and denies that Butoh itself is a dance form. "Most dancers should be ashamed of themselves."

His own one-off performance in Auckland was a spontaneous response to the venue and the audience, he said. Few saw it because there was no public advertising.

But for the less avant-garde and political, good dance is a blend of music and magic, poetry and athleticism, that in some way addresses the soul.

And this year all those qualities were dished up in abundance by the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, in Nine Songs.

They dressed the Aotea Centre's stage in lotus blossoms for their fascinating and extremely beautiful blend of ritual, tradition and thoroughly contemporary dance, celebrating the cycle of birth and death from an Eastern point of view that was imminently relevant and accessible to the Western heart.

Nine Songs was the definite highlight of the dance year, closely challenged by the Sydney Dance Company's Salome.

Theirs was a modern interpretation of the terrible tale, breathtakingly beautiful and dramatically intense. No one who saw it will ever forget the scene in which John the Baptist was separated from his head (no cheap rubber fakes involved here!) or Salome's aerial dance of transcendence.

But on the home front the year definitely belongs to Black Grace Dance Theatre. In June we saw Our Back Yard, featuring Neil Ieremia's comic comment on the games men play - to the death - with a leather ovoid. Black Grace have been busy all over the country for the past 12 months, and finished the year in dashing style with a sparkling programme of new works and performances with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, in Otara and Porirua.

Black Grace have served a long apprenticeship, with persistence and consistently fine performances, and speak with a voice that is all their own.

The Royal New Zealand Ballet Company also trotted out a triumph, in June, with Dracula, which earned 10 points out of 10 for Gothic gore. It seemed the whole country was under the Transylvanian count's spell - aided to quite a big extent by the advertising that made much of the phrase "bloody ballet."

But the hype was well deserved and under choreographer Michael Pink's demands the young dancers of the RNZB proved their talents for fine acting, as well as dance.

The year brought two big disappointments.

The St Petersburg Ballet's Swan Lake was beautifully, if very traditionally, costumed and set. But its performance was lacklustre in the extreme.

More seriously, the passion of Shona McCullagh and Douglas Wright for setting up a full-time contemporary dance company failed to ignite enough support to make it a going concern.

Wright and McCullagh are hugely talented and visionaries. Their company was vital for the state of contemporary dance in New Zealand. Without it, or something like it, the future of modern dance here continues to look grim.

2000: Year in review

2000: Month by month