The Insitu Project is an annual show held at Hagley College which explores spaces around the college campus rather than taking place in a conventional studio or theatre.

Each year the new Hagley Dance Company students present and perform their own original choreography to an audience, revealing hidden talents and strengths. This year’s Company members are Dana Dawson (2nd year), Kereana Mosen, Madi Tumataroa, Tracey Saunders, Imogen Mackintosh and Callie Hitchcock.

For the first time our Year 13 NCEA dance students were invited to be a part of the season to gain credits for 3.2 Choreograph a dance to develop and resolve an idea. Inspiration was drawn from the Hagley College values of:

Whakamarumaru (Responsibility), Mana (Respect), Wakawhirinaki (Trust), and Tika (Integrity). Inspiration has also been taken from Hagley’s koru Tuakana (older koru fern) sheltering Taina (younger fern) as it grows and unfurls.

Ka puāwai te koru, ka puāwai te tangata (as the koru opens, so too does the person).

Dr Ian Lochhead had this to say in his review of the show in a Theatreview article on 29th March:

"In Situ provides a valuable opportunity for Hagley's students to show friends, family and supporters what they have achieved in less than a term of study. It also encourages them to think of dance as something that takes place, not just in the rarefied environment of dedicated performance spaces, but in the everyday world. Forcing them to react to a variety of spaces, it also requires them to consider, as both choreographers and performers, the ways in which differing environments influence the way we move. For the dancers it is a valuable pedagogical exercise while for their audience it is a chance to offer encouragement as well as to share in their sense of discovery."

Here's what Ian had to say about some of the performances:

"...effective was Naressa Gamble's Inside, a piece that is the polar opposite in concept from Lean. The work commenced in an apparently empty dance studio, empty, that is, except for a triple height set of cupboards. In the darkened space fingers slithered from barely opened cupboard doors, stimulating questions of just how many bodies were crammed inside. As the work developed doors were fully opened and dancers moved from one level to another, pushing against and rotating themselves within the confining walls and ceilings. Confronted by these restrictive boundaries and a stage that was, in effect, only just big enough to physically contain them, the four dancers were able to discover greater expressive capacities than when free to move in a much larger space.

Restrictive space was also the theme for the following piece by Year 13 students Jackie Jemmett and Jessie Rickard. Utilising a narrow alley between two buildings closed off at one end by a security fence topped with barbed wire, it was entitled The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. Influenced by the film of the same name, the piece juxtaposed two dancers on either side of the fence, their interactions culminating in the overcoming of the barrier between them in a further reference to the college's koru theme of an older plant protecting a younger.

Year 13 students also choreographed and performed River, situated in a parking lot that the audience observed from the first floor of an adjacent building. In this undefined space the presence of the four dancers barely registered at first but they gradually came together as a cohesive group, representing their shared experiences as students of Dance at the college before they each go their separate ways in the life of finishing school. Given the location, the surprise twist at the end of one dancer hoping into a little yellow car and driving off, should not have been so unexpected.

The practice of contrasting large with small spaces continued with Drawing The Line, a duet for company members, Kereana Mosen and Madi Tumataroa. Seated on either side of a table at the end of a narrow corridor, the two performers responded to one another's movements across a line that bisected the space. Yet, to fully explore this environment, connection and co-operation across this line is necessary, allowing, both literally and metaphorically, for greater heights to be reached than one person is capable of on their own.

Returning to ground level and outdoors, Dana Dawson's Risk invited us to contemplate how everyday experience can be heightened by treating commonplace actions, such as descending a ramp and entering a doorway, in new ways, while Imogen Mackintosh utilised a corner shelter as a framework for a vigorous response to a defined space in Frame. Gisele Proud and Phoebe Hazard, both Year 13 dancers, made use of the stage provided by the veranda of a wooden villa to interact with both the features of the house as well as with each other in a delicate piece called Incrementum.

The final Year 13 offering is Follow Me, Follow Me, Follow Me…Home, jointly choreographed and performed by Olivia Messenger, Ash Stephens and Ayesha Turner-Prattley, in which individual differences and group dynamics are explored.

Returning to where the circuit of the campus began the four remaining company members performed Dana Dawson's Link on the steps of the college's theatre. It was a fitting location for a work intended to express the newfound unity between this group of young performers. By year's end they will, no doubt, have advanced well beyond these steps to occupy, with assurance, the stage itself."

To read the full review, click here.