Lemi Ponifasio, a Samoan choreographer and the founder and director of MAU, New Zealand’s most prolific international contemporary dance and theatre company, returns to the OCC to lift the Greek audience out of their reality once more.

A choreographic activist, Ponifasio raises the audience’s awareness of the problems facing humanity, using the power of his production’s wonderful, hypnotic images.

His works have been called genius, powerful, frightening and inspirational and continue to provoke both attention and controversy.

According to OCC official site, in the Crimson House, Ponifasio poses questions about lives which omnipresent surveillance has transformed into a prison akin to Foucault’s Panopticon, and a society which, though shorn of every last vestige of privacy, since everything is observed and monitored, nonetheless neglects to turn its gaze on itself and its conscience.

Ponifasio links this phenomenon to the omnipresence of the divine in religious traditions and suggests that those who consider observation a route to absolute knowledge are guilty of hubris. Slow ritualistic movements, a minimalist aesthetic, song, distant music and echoes of the rites of a distant civilization create a poetic environment of rare beauty which entrances the viewer but also gives them space to think. A masterpiece from one of the planet’s most important artists.

Location –Time: November 7-9, 2014 at 20:30 – OCC Main Stage

Concept/Design/Choreography/Direction: Lemi Ponifasio
Light: Helen Todd
MAU Company: Ioane Papalii, Charles Koroneho, Nina Arsenault, Teataki Tamango, Bainrebu Tonganibeia, Arikitau Tentau, Muagututia Kelemete Fu’a, Maereke Teteka
Technical Director: Helen Todd
Executive Director: Susana Lei’ataua
Production: MAU