Birds With Skymirrors

»A high chief of Samoa, Ponifasio is clearly a choreographer with political concerns. Tempest references 9/11, America and Iraq. With Skymirrors, he fills an hour and a half with rippling torsos, hands that beat like wings, and feet that somehow glide bodies around the stage. […]
The images created in this work by MAU, Ponifasio’s New Zealand-based company, are physically extraordinary and imaginatively charged, embracing a global view of the world and our place in it. Neither strictly dance nor theatre, these constellations of stylised action are taut with concentration and executed with astonishing precision by performers drawn from mostly non-dance and non-theatre backgrounds. Watching these mini-narratives unfold is like catching a field of sunflowers in the act of turning towards the sun.«
Guardian.co.uk, Alice Bain, 19 August 2010

»The timing is perfect, the effect hypnotic. The stage is dimly lit, and now and then a black and white video projection lights the back wall. The image is of a pelican in the surf flapping helplessly, yet defiantly. With images of the ravaged Gulf of Mexico still fresh in our minds, we assume that its wings are clogged with oil.
Birds with Skymirrors is challenging and unexpectedly moving. The audience is gripped as they watch eight male dancers and three female undulate and writhe, sing and sway. The movements are strange yet familiar and always fascinating.
[…] Ponifasio, a man with a reputation for fearless creativity, was thinking about the end of the world, the notion that humans are simply a part of the earth’s processes. The resulting work, part-dance and part-ceremony, is therefore rooted in the real but concerned with something much bigger, something almost spiritual.«
The Scotsman, Claire Black, 9 August 2010