Lemi Ponifasio’s Birds With Skymirrors is a multi-layered, multi-media production, a series of highly stylized, sometimes hauntingly beautiful, images that create a mystical world onstage. Birds With Skymirrors is a radical composition in dance, ceremony, poetry, and chant that is also a stirring call for action against the trashing of our planet. It’s an elegy to nature and our connectedness within it, an ode to the awful beauty of the apocalyptic moment.
Samoan-born New Zealand-based choreographer Lemi Ponifasio creates his works out of the tensions of the modern world, the politics of race, environment, urban consumerism, environmental awareness, and culture. His company (named MAU after the Samoan independence movement) is no ordinary dance troupe, including fishermen and factory workers among the professional performers, and fusing mythology, ritual movement, and storytelling with contemporary dance theatre.
Birds With Skymirrors was born following Ponifasio’s visit to a remote Pacific island, where he saw frigatebirds carrying videotape in their beaks, glinting like mirrors. The source of the tapes? A huge floating rubbish dump in the Pacific Ocean. On the smallest of islands in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, such shiny, glittering fragments of plastic waste attract the eyes of birds. These tiny sky mirrors, deadly parcels of pollution which adorn the nests of unsuspecting sea birds, are a dreadful if ironic reminder of the fragile beauty of environmentally degraded, remote islands throughout the Pacific.
In times of momentous planetary climate change, Birds With Skymirrors is a dance meditation on our relationship with planet Earth. Ponifasio creates portraits of natural beauty that are juxtaposed starkly against images of the polluting, vandalising presence of humans. He asks, “Can we ever hope to live in harmony with our environment? Can we aspire to become more than vandals? A species integrated with the planet on which we live?”
Critics have been unanimous in their praise of Birds With Skymirrors – for the haunting choreography, stunning visuals, varied soundscape, ingenious lighting design, the singing-chanting, and the precision and beauty of the ten black-clad performers. Lemi Ponifasio meshes the great myths of the Pacific (the ceremonies, gods, animals, and poetry) with acute contemporary aesthetics. Birds With Skymirrors creates an almost ceremonial experience in which time is slowed down, and the audience is encouraged not just to watch, but to reflect: "What is our human role on earth?"
Join us for an extraordinary theatrical experience. And if you have some big questions yourself, you can ask Lemi Ponifasio himself at the post-performance talkback on May 24.
