In Maori, “te wheke” means “the octopus”, both the cephalopod and a mythological creature. Or so I deduce from the program of “Te Wheke”, the work that Atamira Dance Company performed during its debut at the Joyce Theater on Wednesday.
Founded in 2000 in New Zealand, Atamira fuses Maori cultural expression with contemporary dance theatre. There’s an admirable integrity to how the group doesn’t explain much to the uninitiated. Translating almost nothing more than the title, the dancers drop you into their world, gracefully, trusting that you can learn to swim in it.
The environment of “Te Wheke” is oceanic. The first sound is that of the waves. The production design centers on black silk drapes that rise and fall all over the place, like mastless sails. When they move quickly, they seem to spurt and spread like octopus ink. The curtains are also screens for projections: the sparkling ocean surface, the pouring rain.
The eight dancers often suggest or embody sea creatures, often with the help of simple accessories. A mass of knotted rope tangles like tentacles or buzzes when swung by a spinning dancer. The wide plastic tubes also serve as tentacles, slithering over the bodies and enveloping them. But objects also have other uses. Sticks are swung like weapons, and at one point, dancers pull many props out of a sack—balls, pillows, masks—such as a band of traveling musicians or children dressing up.
Near the end, more silk sheets slide across the stage, billowing and bathing the dancers, in a thousand-year-old theatrical representation of the ocean. Beneath those sheets, the dancers, rising and writhing wildly, evoke the undulating, pulsing shape of a giant octopus in motion.
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To be sure, most of this has culturally specific resonances. It can also be viewed formally or abstractly as dance. The central style is low and flowing in an international contemporary vein, but with a precisely struck and stopped action that seems to be lifted from martial arts. These are not dancers you want to mess with. Some Maori elements of the style are closer to pantomime, closer to speech, such as chest-beating and trembling hands, which electrify the poses and add a thrilling shine.
Choreographed by a group of eight that includes Artistic Director, Jack Gray, and Taane Mete and Kelly Nash, who directed together, “Te Wheke” contains group sections of both martial unison and more complex interactions, twisting and breaking unpredictably. A recurring opening duet is cuddly and layered, their blended hugs and slow dances intertwined with more troublesome chest thumping and hand vibrations. It could be happening yesterday or at the beginning of time.
But most of the work is a series of long solos. These have a freehand grace and elasticity, though also a wandering quality. Most seem to represent an internal struggle and break out in some kind of possession, while the dancer breaks down and resists, laughing or screaming.
A program note says that these solos “travel into the esoteric dimensions of human existence.” As much as I respect Atamira’s lack of complacency, I would have liked a little more guidance. And it would have been nice to learn the names of the songs, the chants, and the choral hymns woven through the sound score. A thrash metal track (uncredited but by the Maori band alien weaponry) it’s a delight.
Elsewhere, swathes of the recorded sound score fall into more generic and cheap combinations of drum machine and sentimental strings. Parts of the choreography also feel generic, contemporary in a nonspecific, Western sense.
Still, “Te Wheke” is a multilayered accomplished work. Human figures are frequently projected onto the curtains, always ghostly and sometimes in a double-exposure blur. Anyone can see them as ancestors, representatives of a culture that Atamira fosters in her homeland and now shares with New York.
Atamira Dance Company
See you Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.
