By - 17 Mar 2011
"When Douglas Wright sets his stage with a big grey wall, it's a wall with an enigmatic, palpable life of its own.
If he furnishes his proceedings with a shiny white box on wheels, it is proscenium arch high and can spin like a dervish.
When he specifies a therianthrop, that mythical man-with-an-eagle's head, then that eagle head becomes a veritable godhead, with an omnipotent gaze - and apocalyptic yellow shoes."
By Bernadette Rae
Read this review on NZHerald.co.nz
"Wright has always been the master of arresting visual image,
rich in meaning, fuelled by a piercing intellect, eclectic
imagination and a punishingly, specific point of view.
Then there is the dance!
It comes this time, explosive, lyrical and distinctively
Wright's own via nine brilliant bodies, and set to Heinrich Biber's
The Rosary Sonatas, Wagner's Lohengrin, Rodgers'
and Harts' Blue Moon, beautifully crooned by dancer Will
Barling, Lionel Belasco's Carmencita and original
compositions by David Long,
Rapt deals with themes of loss of identity, sanity,
serenity and ultimately with death.
Three empty chairs move ouija board style in the work's early
moments.
A desperate humanity is variously portrayed; through the moaning
and muttering residents of a madhouse; or as two beings quietly
suffocating in conjoined gasmasks while the opiate of the people,
The TV, orbits dangerously out of control.
But there are also themes of hope, of rebirth, and the very
first image is a filmed one in which an angelically chubby, naked,
baby boy gently pees into his cloudlike couch, and smiles. Later
comes the Zen Buddhist koan: "show me your face before you were
born."
The magnificent Sarah-Jane Howard, another astonishing talent,
dressed in a brief and gauzy dress of springlike green, dominates
the stage with her creative goddess power and beauty, the
comparatively gentle Kelly Nash, in a tunic of ocean blue, her
close ally.
The beautiful bodies of the dancers in full Wright flight - and
much of the music - sing of hope and passion, albeit against the
odds, in Wright's eye.
But the most magical moment of seeming rebirth comes in Alex
Sasha Leonhartsberger's heartstopping solo. His slender frame is
very different to the stocky original, but so completely and
utterly embodies Wright's own magnificent dancing body in this
moment of total transmutation, that it hurts."