Godwits, Kuaka and the Returns of Ausdruckstanz in Aotearoa

Abstract

Movement between hemispheres and across oceans — the north and the south, the Pacific and the Atlantic — as well as what is carried between poles, has been formative in shaping New Zealand’s history and culture, both through the achievements of self-imposed cultural exiles and through those who have returned to share and disseminate their knowledge and experience on these shores mixing and blending it with knowledge of this place. In this writing I consider the continuing influence of European tanztheatre in Aotearoa, New Zealand, through a series of movement forms and patterns learnt in the studio of Shona Dunlop MacTavish. In discovering my body-as-archive through a line of descent that tr..