Masters Thesis – Your Body is a Battleground

Your Body is a Battleground
Design: by Te Aihe Butler, Alexandra Guillot, Owen McCarthy
Directed by John Butterfield

At Te Whaea National Dance and Drama Centre, 11 Hutchison Rd, Newtown, Wellington
From 3 Dec 2014 to 13 Nov 2014
[90 mins]

Reviewed by Lyne Pringle, 5 Dec 2014

Choreographically the work is inventive and for the most succinct. These elegant movers feel into the possibilities of each other’s auras, pushing at the boundaries of stereotypes, conditioning and acceptability. They pose physical questions to each other and to the audience; expressing tension, fear, frustration, confusion and surrender.

Bodies are compiled and dismantled in humorous and poignant vignettes. They dance a touch- less waltz and grapple with the lack of acceptable ‘platonic touch’ in our culture – mudras of longing create very powerful images and words – ‘soft of the hard gaze’ ‘simple streamlined, dangerous’.

Drama One is such a silky space to view the work and John Butterfield has done a brilliant job of co-opting his team of fine performers and designers into an over-arching s aesthetic skin in order to serve the purposes of his Masters thesis. There is a sense that the work has been developed over time with a careful attention to detail and consideration given to shared authorship in the process.

VTS_01_1 from John Butterfield on Vimeo.

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