Erin Harrington reviews Pōtaka Nautilus, presented by Good Company Arts, at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, 27 June 2024.
Good Company Arts, led by Arts Laureate Daniel Belton, creates fascinating multi-modal works that combine contemporary dance, taonga pūoro, sampled electronics and strings, digital video art and virtual reality technologies. Their work Ad Parnassum Purapurawhetu, which was projected outdoors at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora for Matariki in 2022, combined European and Māori mythology with divine mathematical patterns. It was one of my favourite, and most profound, arts encounters that year. Belton’s latest project, Pōtaka Nautilus, is similarly interested in the collapse between the intimate and the galactic, using the golden ratio of the shell’s spiral as its central conceit.
In a helpful act of symmetry, this work is again presented at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora in the Cloisters Studio as part of this Matariki celebrations. This iteration of the work offers a dance film, and then a webcast of dancers engaging with projected film in what looks like a gallery space back-to-back. It’s a little over 30 minutes altogether. You can sit on long benches to watch as the films are projected onto a slightly textured concrete wall. This gives the digital image a sense of tactility that feels apt, alongside the clicks, hums and breathy whipsers of the surrounding soundscape.
The work’s key motifs play with pattern and circularity. Its beats are characterised by phrases built of pulses, breaths, syncopation and repetition, broken up with quiet moments of stillness. Wide, flat ovals act as frames for images, sometimes filling the screen, sometimes sitting in a three-by-three grid. Each are films within films, drawing from a palette of black, white, silver and navy, as if giclee prints have come to life.
Within these ovals, the nautilus shell itself appears frequently. Sometimes a shell is held aloft and blown by a performer. More often the shell is set on its side, the interior providing a space – a haven perhaps, or a type of framework – within which small groups of dancers wearing martial arts-inspired outfits (designed by Kowtow) move through repetitive sequences marked by line and torsion, in which limbs drive up and down at diagonal angles. Their gestures recall the repetitive movements of harakeke weaving; at times, images of kete appear behind and under them, massive against the small, repeated groups of bodies. Sometimes individual dancers are doubled, or quadrupled, dancing in time with themselves. Sometimes they are freed, moving out in the world, standing on a ridge and looking out across the water.
The shell is also figurative, inspiring explicitly digtally-drawn lines that are superimposed over the filmed and rendered images. The curves again repeat in drifts of speckled light that might be the arc of the Milky Way, or sand caught on the ocean’s edge. At points more lyric, free and swooping dancers’ movements speak to the curves of the shell’s exterior. At other times the digitally-edited dancers disappear, replaced by echoing strings of white ovals on black that recall the patterns of genetic testing, or by the cross-hatched marks of tukutuku panels.
As in previous works, these twists and coils are joined by repeated images of the pointed petals that are created by overlapping circles in the sacred geometric ‘flower of life’ pattern. Such circular forms are rendered digitally by line, but the pointed petals are also picked up, wielded physically, by dancers. In recorded elements, some dancers swing them like pūrerehua; in the webcast, two dancers hold them aloft, like patu, while confronting digital images of repeating patterns. Films within films within films, reflecting visual motifs that appear over and over again, in the world around us and across cultures.
The work’s soundscape is dominated by taonga pūoro, particularly the clicks of shells and the various registers of blown instruments, including snail shells and pūtātara. At times, this aural texture is augmented by the throaty rasp of sampled cello and electronic composition. It’s contemplative, in conversation with the image. It’s a call to travel and a call home, asking us to consider matters of scale, as well as the relationship between land and sea.
I have a particularly strong reaction to creative works that are built on pattern and repetition, whether it’s drone or dance music, Steve Reich or Philip Glass, Mark Rothko or Hilma af Klimt. Pōtaka Nautilus scratches that same deep itch in my lizard brain. Like the company’s other multi-modal works, it caters to some profound, meditative sense of satisfaction, or perhaps stimulation, that is triggered by the layered emergence of geometric motif. For that reason, despite the temptation to dip in and out of video works, I think it’s important to engage with the work in full, to let its articulation of warp and weft accumulate. Home viewers can watch a 13-minute film element of the presentation on the company’s website here.
This is a piece that itself spirals in and out; it’s part of a coherent and growing body of work, as well as a project in its own right, full of exploratory iterations. Good Company Arts’ website gives a really worthwhile account of how this work has been developed for a variety of digital applications and re-combinations, here in Aotearoa and at international and digital arts festivals, combining a range of digital assets with flesh-and-bone encounters between dancers and digitised work. It’s honestly fascinating – a way, I wonder, of developing sustainable arts practices that continue to honour the importance of developing work that’s embedded in the soil and water of a place, and of sharing breath in a space, all while feeling out the capacious possibilities of international distribution and collaboration.
That is particularly apt as this work is interested in the way Pacific voices are necessarily at the forefront of our increasingly urgent engagements with climate change. It’s a project that looks to the stars for understanding, although not in the way of those tech oligarchs who fetishise a life off-world at the expense of this one. Here, by reaching up to the cosmic and down to the microscopic, we recognise that wherever we are we are always at the centre, each point of navigation both anchor and aspiration, each movement connected to every other.
Pōtaka Nautilus screens from 19 – 30 June 2024. Parts of the project are also available online, including a 360 VR version that can be watched at home.
Flat City Field Notes 