Jolly but not deep

Over the Moon

Sky City Theatre

Review: Bernadette Rae


The Footnote Dance Company is a miracle of modern dance in New Zealand - our only full-time, professional company. It survives largely through its major focus on dance in education, touring schools throughout the country and introducing youngsters to the fundamentals of dance and movement in a lively, participatory way.

That core business inevitably shows through in their performance programmes.

Footnote is lively, skilful, polished and full of heart. But "deep and meaningful" is not really their forte.

This 1999 programme premiered on Saturday with pieces created by senior choreographers, the supreme Shona McCullagh (pheromone) and Chris Jannides (From Zero to Nothing.) But that jolly, end-of-year-recital feeling persists.

Jannides tries hard but From Zero to Nothing proves to be a long and complicated in-joke, tedious with clicking slides of pretentious text instead of music.

Sample: One dancer lies coiled on his/her side, another is placed, foetus-like, on top and the projected words crank up to announce that Mr Jannides thinks his subconscious mind has plagiarised a Douglas Wright poster.

Some people laughed.

Even McCullagh's piece, which promised much as a treatise based on "meaningful social odours - the language of chemical communication" is unable to break through the bond of blandness.

Footnote's founding force, Deirdre Tarrant, contributes the opening and title piece, Over the Moon. It is a crisp, clean and bouncy little movement essay with rubber balls, blue moons, goal posts and winning lines, all transparent as a bubble - and fun.

Offerings from young choreographers, present or recently dancers with Footnote make up the rest of the evening's fare. There is the sinuous and rather beautiful One more than Two, by Catherine Gardner, set to Douglas Lilburn's Four Canzonas, no 1; a rollicking pastoral fantasy, Two axe handles across, by Katharina Waldner; and Spanner, an exercise in contact improvisation for a couple of guys, made by Melanie Turner, in which there did not seem to be too much contact - but that was the point, maybe?

It is hard to be over the moon about Over the Moon. But they are sweet, undeniably accomplished - and they keep on keeping on!