Strike at the Aotea Centre

By WILLIAM DART

The five percussionists of Strike don't let up during the 80 minutes of their new show. Working for much of the evening inside huge tubular metal cubes strung with a sculptural array of instruments, and reassembled and re-lit from sequence to sequence, the young Wellingtonians effortlessly paired the seismic and the sassy.

There was subtlety, too, along with the feeling that Strike were toying with our sense of perception. In the opening section there was almost the illusion that the musicians were working in slow motion. It was not always obvious which of the many gongs, cymbals and drums were giving out the sound.

Humour was a welcome addition, particularly in the shorter link numbers in front of the curtain. A sequence involving the musicians around a coffee table, creating loopy rhythms with hands and Tui cans, would have passed muster over the Square at the Classic Comedy Lounge.

If there was a unifying theme, it was that of the Four Elements. We gasped at the Fire sequence, with blown meths-fired torches releasing sinister whoops of sound and flaring blasts of colour. The Zorro-like swishes of the bamboo sticks in David Downes' Painting with Breath (a track from Strike's award-winning CD) were appropriately hypnotic and the Water sequence, with on-stage spa pools and endlessly inventive ways of creating sounds with diverse water containers, proved the most sonically fascinating.

Perhaps the PVC xylophone (with its inevitable From Scratch associations) deserved more than driving riffs that could have slipped out of a cop opera theme, but I'm niggling. When I heard the number of heated and enthusiastic discussions among other audience members as they flooded out on to Aotea Square, Strike would seem to have had their collective finger on the pulse. They play again tonight at 8. Don't miss it.