spinning sun dance company

Reviews - Paper Tiger

TAPAC, Auckland 3-5 October 2007
Kaikohe and Kerikeri, 22-23 June 2007
Leigh Hall, Leigh, May 2007

Best choregraphy (joint award) Tempo '07

Ann Dewey's Paper Tiger, a small scale dance work designed for easy touring, set to music by John Gibson, had three public performances during June in the Leigh Community Hall following an extended series of workshops and a focused period of development. Dancers Zoe Watkins and Will Barling presented a subtly nuanced 45 minute series of solos and duets, lit by a combination of fluorescent tubes and portable halogen garden lights against a backdrop of white pleated paper blind anchored by river stones, and foregrounded by dried flax flowers standing in kiln bricks on a strip of carpet.

The dancing was abstract, the dancers elemental, oppositional. Zoe's movements were softer and warmer than Will's, watchfully self-centred at first but progressively expansive and becoming richer, invoking the natural world cohabited by plants, birds, animals, people. Will by contrast was monumental, stoic, and commanded the space even when placed in the background, implying solid landforms such as cliffs and mountain ranges. Partnering sections facilitated a mixing of these elements —and despite the abstract purity of the movement, one entrancing section somehow suggested a bird spiraling upwards in a thermal draft, another the quaking of the earth and a sliding hillside.

-- Raewyn Whyte, DANZ Quarterly

Ann Dewey’s Paper Tiger was a lovely abstract work of solos and duets that explored contrasting youthful energies, set against a Zen-like backdrop of flax sculpture and a white pleated screen.

The movement began with Will Barling and Zoe Watkins in counterpoint, each exploring their own nuances: Barling bulky and sharp, Watkins liquid and undulating. They briefly intersected before returning to singular worlds. The partnering gradually increased, becoming more dynamic and complex until they entwined like vines around each other.

--Francesca Horsley, NZ Listener

There are hundreds of watchable dance moments in Paper Tiger. The  two dancers - in order of appearance: Zoe Watkins and Will Barling - are contained in their exquisite dancerness, but released by Ann's precise and detailed evocation of a lifetime of relationship; the dreaming up, the meeting, the absorbing, the undoing, the abandoning and the traces, left in their bodies. John Gibson's music serves them a platform for intricate musicality and expression. The scene moves us and them around possibilities and time. As with other dance vocabularies in tempo there are moments that seem animalistic, drawn from natural or instinctive movements.

--Felicity Molloy, Theatreview