What They Said

This show is a part of Tempo: Te Rerenga o Tere 2022. To see all Tempo shows at Q, click here. To explore the festival, click here. 

Premiering in October at Tempo Dance Festival 2022 as part of the Tempo: Te Rerenga o Tere programme, What They Said unites The New Zealand Dance Company (NZDC) with celebrated Australian choreographer Jo Lloyd for her first work made on a New Zealand company. 

Jo Lloyd is an award-winning dance artist based in Melbourne, Australia, working with choreography as a social encounter, revealing behaviour over various durations and contexts. Jo has presented work in Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Melbourne International Festival, the National Gallery of Australia, Mona Foma Tasmania, Liveworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

In this cross Tasman collaboration, Lloyd and her longtime collaborators Duane Morrison (Music) and Andrew Treloar (Costumes) take the leap into creating her first “play without words”, for dance. 

Years of gathered phrases, statements and insults, will culminate in an embodied live work that explores our tendency to be preoccupied with drama and our fascination with the inevitable.

As the dancers navigate, persist and exert themselves in an attempt to understand each other, nonpatterns become familiar patterns and a logic is revealed. Potential narratives slip and perceptions morph as the dancers trade words for saturated physical states.

When the words erode and go missing, what do the bodies become? A new moving landscape is formed without extraneous junk. Nature with its own drama, more than a collection of words and pictures, a glorious dance.

What They Said will be simultaneously relentless and mesmerising – a feast for the senses.