Critical Corner: Belle

When the Auckland Arts Festival comes around, I always ask myself what an arts festival is for (because I’m boring like that). Is it for the development of new art? Is it for audiences to engage with art they wouldn’t be able to see without the support of an arts festival? Is it for Six: The Musical? Or all of the above.

Well, now I have a definitive answer: It’s for Belle. For this year, at least.

To expand on that: It’s for shows that are doing what Belle is doing. Something new. Something with spectacle. Something that is like nothing you’ve seen before, and are unlikely to see again (unless you see it twice, which I’m tempted to).

This new show, subtitled A Performance of Air, is the new show from Movement of the Human, one of Aotearoa’s most reliably excellent artistic endeavours. Nine female aerial artists dip in and out of light and shadow throughout the show, in truly the best synthesis between haze and projection that I’ve ever seen. Two legs, bisected from their owner by light, walk across another plane of light. Dancers disappear and reappear from behind a reflective surface. Six dancers leap back and forth, above and across, a plinth. These are just a few of the setpieces that make up Belle’s astoundingly epic hour. Each of these pieces feel less like one in a series but one of a whole.

In short, it’s a lot of things that made me mouth “what the actual fuck”. There’s a point to all of it – the creative notes say that it “[serves] as a meditation on our physical and spatial constructs and the realms that exist beyond them” – but there is a deep satisfaction to be found in the spectacle. Whether that be the spectacle of what the human body can do, accentuated by these specific bodies being nearly constantly in silhouette, or what light can do to our perception of those same bodies in movement, it is a hugely satisfying – and overwhelming show. When musician Anita Clark (violin and vocals, sometimes simultaneously).

To zoom out wider, past the walls of the theatre, it’s important to realise that Belle is what happens when investment is given to our local artists. Be that the key creatives (director Malia Johnston, designer Rowan Pierce, composers Eden Mulholland, Anita Clark and Jolyon Mulholland), the performers onstage, or the festival in general. Sustained investment, wildly, pays off. Our talent is on an international level, but our work can’t achieve what our talent is capable of without that investment.

Belle is proof of that. It’s what arts festivals are for.

Belle runs until March 9 at the Kiri Te Kanawa Centre as part of Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival.

Other Things I’ve Consumed

• The Material by Camille Bordas is the Emilia Perez of American stand-up comedy, but in a good way. A delightful, bleak, 100% French take on an American artform.
• Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson came highly recommended but it didn’t quite hit the mark with me. It’s about a queer kid, the guy he became obsessed with, and their various intersections over the next 20 years.

Things to Read

• I loved this long read (from Vulture) on the only play Toni Morrison wrote.

Self-Promo

• If you’ve got a kid and want them to do cool performance-related things during the April holidays, can I recommend checking out the National Youth Drama School? A bunch of amazing people are teaching, and I am also teaching (playwriting!).

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