Choreography as creative research

The Dance Studies Programme hosts a meeting ground and project space for dancers, choreographers, performing artists and scholars.

Award-winning choreographer Nicholas Rowe has worked with numerous ballet and dance companies in New Zealand and overseas. His research is focused on the choreographic voice of marginalised and traumatised communities.

He is currently engaged in the 5cities5senses dance for the camera project, a collaborative choreographic work involving five community dance organisations in different parts of the world.

Dr Carol Brown is an award-winning choreographer and artistic director renowned internationally for her collaborative performances.  

Some recent choreographic research projects are summarised below.

Cicada

This research project explores the limits of technology, the human body and the insect world through a duet between two dancers and a suite of 16mm analogue film projectors extended through wearable sensors into the digital realm. Focusing on film as an endangered species, the project aligns the mechanical sound world of projectors with the shrill antiphonal music of cicadas with their choric behaviours.

The House Project

This is an interdisciplinary ambulatory research performance that creates a dialogue between colonial heritage architecture and land, or whenua. The first iteration of this project – out the window bone breath feather – explores windows as liminal thresholds between inside and outside. With original music by Gillian Whitehead, the work was initially researched at the Pah Homestead in Auckland.

Tongues of Stone

Making urban space speak through performance, Tongues of Stone mobilises city architecture constructed by corporate and industrial networks as poetic spaces.

Premiered in April 2011, this work launched Perth as a Dancing City, part of the Ciudades que Danzan, an international network of 32 cities that promote dance as a vehicle for urban expression and civic and cultural regeneration.

Subsequently it has been adapted for Auckland: Blood of Trees (World Water Day 2012); 1000 Lovers (Auckland Arts Festival 2013) and Tuna Mau (Oceanic Performance Biennale 2013); and it is currently being developed for performances in Rarotonga, Cook Islands and Prague, Czech Republic.