AD PARNASSUM - Purapurawhetū
At the heart of this project there are points of inspiration from Māori, Mediterranean and European cultures. Ad Parnassum - Purapurawhetū pays homage to Bauhaus artist Paul Klee's painting "Ad Parnassum" through digital augmentations of Mount Parnassus as a temple or wharenui. Director Daniel Belton’s film edit and design re-choreographs the prerecorded dance to synchronise with Gillian Whitehead's score. Music steers the narrative to support nine women through interconnecting solos that link us to Delphi and the Muses of Antiquity.
Dance artist Jahra Wasasala opens the film - centipedes partner mountain ranges and dragonflies play with Wasasala as Flower of Life blueprints are seeded. Linear depictions of Mount Parnassus (after Klee’s Pyramid form), resonate with ancient and futuristic dimension. They represent the old hierarchical world - a model being superseded and rebalanced through new leadership from women. Ad Parnassum - Purapurawhetū advocates for an inclusive vision of co-creation, and wholeness for all beings and all life.
World Pemiere at The Arts Centre Christchurch Te Matatiki Toi Ora for Matariki Festival Mānawatia a Matariki as expanded cinema outdoor projection installation (Quadrangle site, June 21-July 4th 2022 hosted by Te Matatiki Toi Ora). Winter Solstice opening live dance and taonga pūoro activation (Nancy Wijohn/Kelly Nash/Alistair Fraser with Daniel Belton, Donnine Harrison, Jac Grenfell, Stuart Foster, Gillian Whitehead and Good Company Arts team). Lecture-dem with Daniel Belton and Gillian Whitehead at The Teece Museum of Classical Antiquities hosted by University of Cantebury. Puaka Matariki Festival screening and lecture-dem hosted by Dunedin Public Art Gallery. KAKUSEI Exhibition at Gallery OUT of PLACE, Nara, Japan 2023: Giclée prints and interactive film projection installation supported by the Asia New Zealand Foundation; Auckland Central Libraries Matariki 2023 Projection Installation Commission; Auckland University of Technology Media Wall Matariki Installation Commission 2023. Winner Best Art/Dance Film Athens International Art Film Festival 2023, Winner Best Female Composer Paris Women Festival 2023, Winner Best Dance Video Black Owl Festival Bodrum 2024. Funded by Creative New Zealand toi Aotearoa. Supported by Massey University, Kate Sylvester, Dunedin City Council, The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora and partners.
“Ad Parnassum – Purapurawhetū is a compelling, multi-layered work - a vision of light and warmth. In this magical space cultural boundaries intertwine and dissolve. This is an auspicious collaboration by a team of New Zealand’s leading contemporary artists” Theatreview
“A magnificently holistic piece that feels organic and divine, both alien and familiar; it’s like staring at once at a grain of sand and at the centre of a galaxy” Flat City Field Notes
The reappearance of the Matariki constellation (also known as the Pleiades) represents the end of the Māori lunar year and marks the beginning of a new year. Matariki is a time of celebration and ceremony in Aotearoa New Zealand. Daniel, Donnine Harrison and the Good Company Arts team have created a celestial voyage of beauty and coherence featuring new music from Dame Gillian Whitehead. The film unfolds in a spectacle of dance solos with Nancy Wijohn, Kelly Nash, Jahra Wasasala, Christina Guieb, Neve Pierce, Stephanie Halyburton, Lucy Marinkovich, Laura Saxon-Jones, and Kiki Miwa. Their movement catalyses the atmosphere, hue and light intensity of the film realms they traverse.
In Māori tradition, there are the nine stars of Matariki; Matariki (Alcyone) – the mother of the other stars in the constellation. Pōhutukawa – connects Matariki to the dead and is the star that carries our dead across the year (Sterope/Asterope). Tupuānuku – is tied to food that grows in the ground (Pleione). Tupuārangi – is tied to food that comes from above your head such as birds and fruit (Atlas). Waitī – is tied to food that comes from fresh water (Maia). Waitā – is tied to food that comes from salt water (Taygeta). Waipunarangi – is tied to the rain (Electra). Ururangi – is tied to the winds (Merope). Hiwaiterangi/Hiwa – is the youngest star in the cluster, the star we send our wishes to (Celaeno).
Māori refer to Women as te whare tangata (the house of humanity), recognising the vital roles Women play in providing life and nurturing future generations. Women are respected for their ability to create life - they are regarded with the same consideration as Papatūanuku (Mother Earth), the creator of all life. Whenua means both placenta and land - the afterbirth was buried, binding people to their source of life, physically through Women and spiritually to the land.
In Ad Parnassum - Purapurawhetū the dancers become part of a shared visual and sculptural language. Gillian’s music drives the total work which carries human figures in a gliding vista - a singing bowl, a celestial waka or ship brimming with movement and colour codes. The channel for union with something mystical and divine is dance. Dance activates sacred geometry with the conductive power of gesture and breath. When we look out into space we are seeing our own origins - all life is interwoven from the cellular to the cosmic.
Ko wai ngā tāngata | Creatives behind the film work AD PARNASSUM - Purapurawhetū
Daniel Belton (director, concept, designer, cameras, optics/sound post, choreo-post, film editor), Donnine Harrison (creative producer, designer), Gillian Karawe Whitehead (music composer, collaborator) with the New Zealand String Quartet and Alistair Fraser (taonga pūoro); fashion designer Kate Sylvester (couture) and the Good Company Arts digital film team featuring Jac Grenfell (motion graphics, cinema 4D/2D animation, audio design), Nigel Jenkins, Josef Belton (kinetic props), Bradon McCaughey (cameras) and Stuart Foster (spatial lighting, props, cameras). Choreographers/dance performers are Nancy Wijohn, Kelly Nash, Jahra Wasasala, Christina Guieb, Laura Saxon-Jones, Lucy-Margaux Marinkovich, Neve Pierce, Kiki Miwa and Stephanie Halyburton.
“The vision of a celestial divine offered by Ad Parnassum – Purapurawhetū has been a key aspect of The Arts Centre’s Matariki programming. The work is a remarkable and enthralling full-length dance-art film, presented by Daniel Belton, Donnine Harrison and Good Company Arts, and inspired by Belton’s encounter ten years ago with Bauhaus artist Paul Klee’s painting “Ad Parnassum”.
This cross-disciplinary collaboration, which brings together the country’s finest contemporary and digital art, dance and musical talents, plays with a panoramic sense of depth and scale. A series of dance solos offer a vocabulary marrying Māori dance art and movement, contemporary dance, and ballet. Nine dancers (Nancy Wijohn, Jahra Wasasala, Christina Guieb, Kelly Nash, Neve Pierce, Stephanie Halyburton, Lucy Marinkovich, Laura Saxon-Jones, and Kiki Miwa) are at once the nine stars of Matariki, the nine Greek muses who live on Parnassus, the seven sisters of the Pleiades, all wāhine toa. They wear gorgeous, bright white sculptural shirts and skirts, designed by Kate Sylvester. They change in size, are multiplied, sometimes moving along the lowest edge of the screen, which becomes both stage and horizon, sometimes taking up the entire screen in intimate close up. The digital playback of torsion and long-lined, full-bodied gesture pulses between flowing and abrupt, which feels controlled yet otherworldly. Playback is frequently slowed, giving the sense of women dancing through water, their movements sometimes dragging afterimages behind them. These sequences are dreamy, interior, and at times feel improvisatory, as if we have been allowed access to some private ceremony.
Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead’s stunning score, which draws from Ancient Greek and Māori musical modalities, is given life by the New Zealand String Quartet, with Al Fraser on taonga pūoro. Strings slide around in pitch, offsetting low drones of sustained notes and lyrical, mournful melodic lines, with brisk pizzicato, the soft rasp of bow on string, and the hums, clicks, rattles and throaty calls of taonga pūoro. The score offers a sense of mystery that leaves your heart in your throat; in playing with a sense of undulating duration, it feels like the universe breathing.
Music and layered visuals are beautifully integrated. Slow-moving 3D animated sequences with remarkable depth recall Mount Parnassus, home to the muses, but also photographs of nebulae, while invoking the pointillist texture of Klee’s painting. High contrast light and dark is softened with smudged drifts of cloudy colour. In a 2D plane, shapes and lines inspired by Klee’s painting, as well as the crosshatching of tukutuku panels, extend out into angles and curves of an expanding Fibonacci sequence. This sacred geometry coils off into a koru, and responds to mathematical shifts in phase in the thrumming soundscape. The dancers often use mirrored kinetic props and poi, whose shapes are echoed in the digitally rendered mise-en-scene. Geometric pops of colour respond to the patterns emerging from the soundtrack, and that recall the repetitive tiles and points in Klee’s work: depth and texture, texture and depth”
“…the sense of ritual and circularity: the music of the spheres is the voice of the stars, is the visual language of the bodies, is the flickering of line and colour, is the hum and echo of swirling, slow-moving visual structures; it’s like staring at once at a grain of sand and at the centre of a galaxy”
“a magnificently holistic piece that feels organic and divine, both alien and familiar. It’s one of the best pieces of performance art to have graced the city all year” Flat City Field Notes (Arts and Culture in Ōtautahi Christchurch)
"Ad Parnassum Purapurawhetū is a work that draws on ancient greek and Māori mythology as well as referencing Paul Klee’s 1932 painting Ad Parnassum. It was suggested that Klee’s painting was referencing the concept of learning and knowledge itself. This too could be said for Belton’s digital painting. With digital augmentations of Mount Parnassus likened to a temple or wharenui, Belton delicately navigates and weaves female figures through his celestial landscapes, paying homage to foundational knowledge systems from which societies, and cultures have been built, and future possibilities can be envisioned.
Purapura whetū (star seeds, or sometimes, star dust) is the Arawa name for a tukutuku pattern that represents the stars and the great numbers of people of a nation. The female figures that people the skies of this work celebrates the Māori belief in the vital role that women play, providing life and nurturing future generations.
The marriage of mythology, time, technology and science is a common thread aesthetically and thematically in Belton’s works. Ad Parnassum Purapurawhetū plays with scale as a way to explore these ideas. The figures appear as deities, atua-like or saintly in stature, at times life size and human, and then again they appear small numerous and repeated mark makers on the screen, like spirits, faraway stars or single cells. Feathers and wings, symbolise the singular and cellular as a feather forms a wing, and from the micro to the macro and meta, a wing to a flock, ad infinitum" Theatreview
Theatreview Review Link: https://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=13085
FlatCityFieldNotes Review Link: https://flatcityfieldnotes.com/2022/07/07/review-matariki-at-the-arts-centre-ad-parnassum-purapurawhetu-thorchard-and-pohutukawa/
Direct Film Link: https://vimeo.com/dbel/adparnassum-gcasite
Winner Best Art/Dance Film Athens International Art Film Festival* Semi-Finalist New York International Women Festival* Winner Best Female Composer Paris Women Festival* Official Selections Paris Awards Film Festival (Matariki)* Semi-Finalist Snow Leopard International Film Festival (Matariki)* Official Selection Sydney World Festival (Kakusei)* Official Selection Roma Short Film Festival (Kakusei)* Official Selection Golden Laurel International Film Festival Athens (Kakusei)* Semi-Finalist International Cosmopolitan Film Festival of Tokyo (Kakusei)* Semi-Finalist New York International Women Festival (Matariki)* Semi-Finalist Vienna Indie Short Film Festival (Matariki)* Semi-Finalist Dubai Independent Film Festival (Matariki)* Semi-Finalist Istanbul Movie Awards (Kakusei)* Semi-Finalist Sydney Indie Short Festival (Kakusei)* Winner Best Visual Effects LNDN Music Video Awards (Kakusei)* Winner Best Visual Effects Nottingham Music Video Awards (Kakusei)* Winner Best Dance Video Black Owl Festival Bodrum (Matariki)* Official Selection Scenofest Exhibition World Stage Design 2025 (Sharjah, UAE)*
Image: Ad Parnassum, Paul Klee (1932) courtesy of Zentrum Paul Klee
