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In Maori, “te wheke” means “the octopus,” each the cephalopod and a mythological creature. Or so I collect from this system of “Te Wheke,” the work that Atamira Dance Firm carried out throughout its debut on the Joyce Theater on Wednesday.
Based in 2000 in New Zealand, Atamira fuses Maori cultural expression with modern dance theater. There’s an admirable integrity to how the group doesn’t clarify a lot to the uninitiated. Translating virtually nothing however the title, the dancers drop you into their world, graciously, and belief you could discover ways to swim in it.
The surroundings of “Te Wheke” is oceanic. The primary sound is that of surf. The manufacturing design is centered on black silk curtains which can be raised and lowered all through, like sails with out a mast. Once they transfer shortly, they appear to spurt and unfold like octopus ink. The curtains are additionally screens for projections: the glowing ocean floor, driving rain.
The eight dancers typically recommend or embody sea creatures, often with the assistance of easy props. A mass of knotted rope entangles like tentacles or whirs when swung by a spinning dancer. Huge plastic tubing serves as tentacles, too, sliding over and enveloping our bodies. However objects additionally produce other makes use of. Sticks are twirled like weapons, and at one level, the dancers pull many props out of a sack — balls, pillows, masks — like a band of touring gamers or youngsters enjoying dress-up.
Close to the top, extra silken sheets are run throughout the stage, billowing, washing over the dancers, in an age-old theatrical illustration of the ocean. Beneath these sheets, the dancers, rising and writhing wildly, conjure the rippling, pulsating type of an enormous octopus in movement.
Extra on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This Spring
Little doubt most of this has culturally particular resonances. It will also be considered formally or abstractly as dance. The core type is low-slung and fluid in a global modern vein, however with exactly attacked, end-stopped motion that appears to be drawn from martial arts. These aren’t dancers you need to mess with. Some Maori parts of the type are nearer to pantomime, nearer to speech, like chest-thumping and quivering fingers, which electrify poses and add an exhilarating shimmer.
Choreographed by a bunch of eight that features the inventive director, Jack Grey, and Taane Mete and Kelly Nash, who directed collectively, “Te Wheke” accommodates group sections, each of martial unison and of extra advanced interactions, swirling and breaching unpredictably. A gap duet that recurs is tender and layered, its embraces and matched sluggish dancing intertwined with extra troubled chest-thumping and hand vibrations. It may be occurring yesterday or originally of time.
However a lot of the work is a collection of lengthy solos. These have a freehand grace and elasticity, if additionally a wandering high quality. Most appear to enact an inside battle and erupt in some sort of possession, because the dancer collapses and resists, laughing or screaming.
A program observe says that these solos “journey into the esoteric dimensions of human existence.” As a lot as I respect Atamira’s lack of pandering, I’d have welcomed slightly extra steering. And it will have been good to study the names of the songs, chants and choral hymns threaded by the sound rating. A thrash steel monitor (uncredited however by the Maori band Alien Weaponry) is a deal with.
Elsewhere, swathes of the recorded sound rating lapse into extra generic, cheapening combos of drum machine and nostalgic strings. Swathes of the choreography additionally really feel generic — modern in an unspecific and Western sense.
Nonetheless, “Te Wheke” is an completed work of many layers. Often, human figures are projected onto the curtains, at all times ghostly and generally with a double-exposure blur. Anybody can see these as ancestors, representatives of a tradition that Atamira furthers in its homeland and is now sharing with New York.
Atamira Dance Firm
By means of Sunday on the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.
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