Tempo Dance Festival - 2017

2017 marked Carrie Rae Cunningham’s third festival, supported this year by Kirsty Brownfield who joined Tempo as General Manager. With performances mainly based at the central city Q Theatre, the ten days of fifty- six festival events filled every inch of the building, from the basement Vault to the windows overlooking Queen Street. Over six hundred and fifty dance artists participated in a myriad of dance and performance productions. 

One of the most anticipated events of the festival was the premiere of Sarah Foster-Sproull’s Orchids. A full-length work for six woman plus Sproull-Foster’s 7 year old daughter Ivy Foster, the work had been in development for three years.  This production saw Rangatira filled to the rafters over its’ two night run. Another highly anticipated show was Limbs @40. Marking forty years since the founding of the iconic Limbs Dance Company, this programme featured young dancers from dance tertiary programmes including the New Zealand School of Dance and Unitec in choreography by former Limbs members Mary Jane O’Reilly, Douglas Wright and Mark Baldwin. 

The Wine Project, by Java Dance, saw the crushing of grapes and fermenting of juice during this intimate and active dance theatre work. Ngaro, by Louise Potiki-Bryant was a solo performance combing video, sound and dance by this acclaimed wāhine Māori creative artist.  

Jahra Wasasala presented her evocative and visceral solo ‘a world, with your wound in it’ combining spoken word, a sound score, and film by Pati Solomona Tyrell.  Highlighting the diversity of this year’s festival programme was the appearance, in whY Chromozone, of venerated ballet dancer Sir John Trimmer, aged 78 years old, with William Fitzgerald in the duet Lark by Loughlan Prior. whY Chromozone also featured a work by val smith, Enough, in which two hairy, faceless creatures slowly traversed across the performance space and the highly theatrical solo Blue Bird by Christopher Olwage, clothed in feathers and pointe shoes. The all-male Cudo (six dancers, a DJ and video artists) blended contemporary and hip hop dance in a collaboration between Movement of the Human (Malia Johnston) and Andrew Cesan. The mixture of body percussion, humour and virtuoso displays of fancy flips offered another varied and original work to the Tempo lineup in 2017.