Siva celebrates in theatrical style

Black Grace celebrates 20 years of contemporary Pacific dance.

Black Grace draws on the company’s best work over the past two decades

To celebrate his company's 20 years of ground-breaking and shaking contemporary Pacific dance, Black Grace founder and director Neil Ieremia has created a new work from sections of what has gone before, reconstructing these most fertile fragments from his impressive body of work into a powerful statement of his quest for a truthful cultural identity.

He has dressed it in new splendours: striking and glamorous costumes, some extraordinarily beautiful audio-visual components, automations, a mobile set and dramatic lighting. An impressive choir also appears on stage, lifting the dramatic soundscape to new heights.

With just eight dancers Siva more than fills the Aotea Centre's big stage.

Another programme to mark the company's 20th anniversary, 20 for 20, (performing in 20 venues from Kaitaia to Oamaru for just $20 a ticket) kicks off in the north just two days after Siva's final performance tonight, underlining the phenomenal strength, stamina and spirit of the Black Grace dancers.

It is this Black Grace signature of power, of stamping, hurtling, leaping, throwing and totally trusting bodies, never for a moment losing their dancers' grace that has won the company so many hearts, both here and internationally, for two decades and the combination of energy and Ieremia's signature of soft and spiralling, almost balletic movement remain the ultimate stars in this latest showing.

In the first of the four sections, a tangle of bodies, limbs gleaming against the dark, slowly unfurl into new space, signifying birth and rebirth in an upside-down universe. Section 2 recalls Surface 2003, based on the forms and insistent rhythms of the traditional Samoan tattoo, leaving its mark on both the inner and outer man. The Nature of Things 2011, and the climactic Waka 2012 are the source works for the third section, light and frothy as a carefree wavelet in its beginning, but growing to a threatening roar and featuring a genius piece of AV design.

The finale echoes an earlier Urban Youth Movement programme where huge, angular blocks form an ever-changing cityscape in sharp contrast to a Pacific Island's soft curves.

Then there is a coda, in Minoi Minoi, the company's brilliant Samoan-style slap-dance. Behind it an immense and beautiful piece of graffiti style art expands in brilliant hibiscus colours, a chubby baby laughing at its centre.