Jack Gray Returns Home to Open Tempo Dance Festival

Jack Gray Returns Home to Open Tempo Dance Festival with His Cultural Opus

Atamira Dance Company presents

MITIMITI
Choreographed by Jack Gray

An accumulation of 5 years of ground-breaking indigenous dance comes to a head at Q Theatre 30 September – 3 October in the premiere season of Atamira Dance Company’s Mitimiti at Tempo Dance Festival 2015. Choreographer Jack Gray has laboured love into what will be a gallery-style performance from one of the countries leading dance companies, with special guest appearances (from Aboriginal, Chamorro and Kiowa cultures) that make this season a truly global experience. Mitimiti opens the 12th Tempo Dance Festival celebrating dance across Auckland’s stages this October.

Audiences will enter the transformed Rangatira theatre where they will be immersed in the multi-dimensional world of Te Kore (the potential) that defies the traditions of conventional dance practice. Overhead a giant floating Atamira (platform) reflects projections designed by the lauded Lisa Reihana (In Pursuit of Venus (Infected)), and audience members are invited to watch from the galleries, as well as move about during the performance. Mitimiti (meaning ‘to lick’) is inspired by tribal stories buried around the coastal settlement of Mitimiti in the Hokianga Harbour, connecting to this place from a distinctly urban New Zealand outlook.

Mitimiti rests somewhere in the dunes, and on the edges of bloodied dreams, calling us to enter a new realm. The bones of yourself, of an ancestor, a whale, a house become fleshed out by multiple design and movement innovations, unveiling the secrets of the Atamira (platform) in a unique multi-level gallery-style. Mitimiti is the departure point to disrupt, reconfigure, and invoke.

Jack Gray is an internationally based dance artist, facilitator and cultural advocate. A guest teacher at both University of California Berkeley and University of California Riverside, Jack has returned to Atamira to premiere his first full length work, the culmination of 5 years of research and development conducted both nationally and internationally. As part of the road to discovering Mitimiti, Jack and dancers recently returned there with television programme Marae D.I.Y, supported by Mitmiti on the Grid (an organisation facilitating the deployment of broadband and tellecommunications services in Mitimiti) in February this year with 120 other tribal members to restore their ancestral Marae, with overwhelming success. He’s in hot demand on the international circuit, having just been invited to be 2016 Artist in Residence at Asia/Pacific/American Institute at New York University.

Joining Atamira for the premiere season of Mitimiti is a high calibre line-up of both international and national guests. Among them highly acclaimed guest collaboratorFrances Rings from Sydney, notably one of Australia’s most famous dancers and associate choreographer for Bangarra Dance Theatre, the contemporary aboriginal dance company that inspired Jack with the idea to create/form Atamira in 2000.Francois Richomme from Montpellier, France, an exponent of quadrophonic sound technology, is coming specifically to Aotearoa to compose an original score with Jack and Atamira, after meeting in California last year at the Indigenous Choreographers at Riverside Project.

Inspired by the mana of this collaborative project, Mitimiti has even moved its own locals to represent the very best of their Hokianga culture in this production. Waimihi Hotere(from Boy, 2010) is the niece of famed Maori artist, Ralph Hotere from Mitimiti (who passed away in 2013) whose paintings inspired the all-black look of the show. Robyn Kamira, the Kaitiaki of the Kamira Manuscripts, supports the kaupapa of Jack and also recently organised Mitimiti on the Grid, enabling Mitimiti to be the first marae in the world to pilot remote internet and wifi management.

Performing from Atamira Dance Company will be Bianca Hyslop, Nancy Wijohn, Gabrielle Thomas, Te Arahi Easton and Matiu Hamuera.

Mitimiti plays
Q Theatre Rangatira, 305 Queen Street, Auckland
Performances: 30 September – 3 October, 8pm
Tickets: $10 - $45. Early Bird and Group prices available. Please visit www.qtheatre.co.nz
Tickets available through Q Theatre – 09 309 9771 or www.qtheatre.co.nz

ends

© Scoop Media