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A Line Going For A Walk RealTime issue #100 Dec-Jan 2010 pg. 25
jonathan marshall: daniel belton's line dances

LINE DANCES IS THE LATEST COLLECTION OF SHORT CINEMATIC WORKS FROM NEW ZEALAND CHOREOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER DANIEL BELTON. AFTER THEIR LAUNCH IN DUNEDIN, BELTON INTENDS TO TOUR THE PIECES. THEY ARE HOWEVER PRINCIPALLY DESIGNED TO BE VIEWED ONLINE.

Belton's early training as a painter is again evident in these works. He references many of the visual and thematic concerns of his previous films and multimedia dance pieces (RT92)—lines of perspective and sketched trajectories evoking Renaissance illustration, architectural drawings, as well as influences from Russian Constructivism, Futurism and the delicate, minimalistic version of Modernist painting seen in the work of Paul Klee. Belton indeed cites Klee's lectures at the Bauhaus School of Art during the 1920s as a key influence.

The Bauhaus is known for promoting the notion of colours possessing specific correspondences to each other and to spiritual sensations. With the exception of a few geometric blocks of red recalling the work of Piet Mondrian and the Constructivists, Belton's Line Dances, though, are largely black and white.

This suits Belton's purposes well. It gives Line Dances an antique feel consistent with the broadly Modernist visual iconography, as well as establishing a link between these allusions and earlier Baroque and Rococo architectural settings and theatrical modes. The commedia dell'arte Harlequin—or his representation as a figure of ironic playfulness and visual fantasy in Modernist art by Cocteau, Picasso and others—appears, as does a generic, white-attired Columbine ballerina, along with clockwork, automaton-like figures, angular acrobats (looking as if they have stepped out of Meyerhold's productions) and line drawings of fantastic spaces and buildings with indeterminate, shifting dimensions (shades of Klee's Room Perspective With Inhabitants, 1921, and The Great Dome, 1927).

Klee's influence is manifest principally in the work's conceptualisation. He saw abstract art as based on transparency and opacity, enabling multiple perspectives and viewpoints to be layered to make up a larger, composite picture. Belton either follows suit, or produces similar effects, by dividing the screen into repeating and varying fragments. The reproduction of dancers, figures, motifs, lines and even sounds across the field of perception is a marked feature of Line Dances' aesthetic.

The onscreen figures are light as paper. Lines of movement or shape are carefully traced across the screen, and then morphed into lyrical smudges. This recurrent theme gives a curious immateriality to the figure. Belton explains in his program notes that he sees the screen as an inherently "artificial" realm, hence his bodies have no weight. They arc, glitch, twitch, curve, multiply and swing, but never thud, hit, crash or stop. The look of the piece, as well as the movement of objects and human shapes, is of constantly evolving insubstantiality.

It is the conditional sketchiness of Belton's films that provides their central structural conceit, as well as their curiously unresolved ambience. Although often described as a producer of "dance films," Belton's relative lack of concern for bodies qua bodies, and his construction of the body as merely one element among a number of parabolic, architectural, painterly and photographic motifs (notably stop-motion photography, as in the work of Anton Bragaglia, Étienne-Jules Marey and its painterly versions by Umberto Boccioni) means that his cinema is perhaps best characterised as moving painting, akin to that of avant-garde filmmakers Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack and Len Lye, whose work Belton's intermittently evokes.

Klee contended that art should represent a "multiform world…[a] branching and spreading array"—which Belton literally shows in one film, offering an ever diminishing series of budding miniature figures sprouting from rods held at the shoulder of an initial character—and which Klee compares with the "root" and "crown" of a tree. Like Klee, Belton constantly oscillates from one point, outcome or physical position (the crown), through to a root, and then back again. The ideal metaphoric structure for Belton and Klee is therefore the Golden Ratio of mathematician Fibonacci and Cubist theorist Albert Gleizes: the recurrent spiral, such as one sees inside a Nautilus shell. These films never resolve, but microcosmically coil and repeat internally at an ever-reduced scale. Whilst this approach underpins Modernist painting, it is perhaps less effective for the movement in time of the screen space or of the music (which is also simple, repetitive and variational).

The planetoids threading their way backwards and forwards along a white parabola running behind the dancer therefore epitomise this cinematic cycle. Complex and sophisticated though Belton's films are, they function more as sketches than as final paintings; as a provisional, thoughtful set of lines, or as Klee might say, "a line going for a walk."

Daniel Belton & Good Company, Line Dances, director, performer, editor Daniel Belton, co-producer, performer Donnine Harrison, piano Anthony Ritchie, Metro Theatre, Otago Festival of the Arts, Dunedin, New Zealand, Oct 10-12; www.goodcompanyarts.com/good-company-arts-line-dances.htm

Despite tutus, toe shoes and piano accompaniment, there is nothing conventional about choreographer Daniel Belton's film Line Dances. Good Company's film cements Dunedin's reputation as a source of innovative dance ideas, where leading exponents in the arts work together enriching each others pieces. On this occasion it is Anthony Ritchie who has composed the score for Line Dances and who also plays it, as an introduction, to create an otherworldly atmosphere before the screen darkens.

Line Dances reiterates themes from Belton's other works, notably the dance performance Soundings, which was performed at the Regent Theatre at a previous Arts Festival. It is as if Belton has decided that if he can vary his presentation, a wider audience will eventually understand and appreciate the substance behind what he shows us. My companion was not hesitant in proclaiming that she felt on another planet from the choreographer, and Belton gave no concessions to the conventions of theatre, spurning dynamic pacing, climax and denouement. Episodic in nature, with each section cryptically titled, the energy consistently ebbed and flowed, as unrelenting as the line of the horizon.

Sir Jon Trimmer, as the fool, is the only character we see in close up, old and raddled with a kindly gleam in his eye he conducts the dancers by baton. These dancers - tiny, dainty, silent figures - appear to respond, moving to and fro. Highly delineated and balanced on phantasmagorical constructions of lines that suggest edifices, houses, churches, staircases, they defy gravity, dancing upside down along imaginary footpaths. Impeccable lighting paints their costumes so that even when in monochrome they glow lustrous against a black backdrop.This is not dance where the sweat flies, muscles strain and breath is laboured. It is far more the ultimate refinement of ballet as an illusion divorced from the earth, poised on its toes; it reflects Western society's heady preoccupation with the intellect.

Accompanied by the click and whirr of ancient mechanisms, the music is interlaced with ambient sound redolent of the workings of the antique concertina camera that looms large between each choreographic story, magnified in size as many times as the dancers are diminished in scale.

The commonality of the "digital weather, choreographic weather, weather of physics" that the dancers encounter, of which Belton writes, is unpredictability. The dancers with their stretching and contracting movements are the space that influences the trajectory of light.

They show us a "between" world. On one side is the choreographer's idea made physical by the dancers and on the other side the camera recording the dancer's images two-dimensionally. These two activities are not dependant on the observer, whereas the in-between world depends on for its actuality on the interaction of the audience, what they bring to their observation and interpretation.

Attempting to explain the nature of light, quantum physics lends itself to depiction in dance.
Moving at the speed of light, photons bounce off obstacles with random abandonment. Belton's dancers similarly tumble irrepressibly along linear pathways.

Line Dances is significant in that it contains a universal truth; whichever world we are in, whichever world we see, is different from that of the people in the other world looking back at us.

Line Dances is a vehicle for the choreographer, although Belton surrounds himself with superb dancers and supporting crew. The dancers are viewed as if backwards through a telescope, and apart from recognising the quizzical, querulous gait of Donnine Harrison, as the goose girl, they would be hard to distinguish from each other if you bumped into them on the street.

Belton challenges the way we view dance and his demands upon his art form to explicate complex scientific theories, undermines our certainty of what dance is able to convey, lifting our horizons as to what it is capable of.

Quoting the modernist artist Paul Klee, Belton states his intention is also for "the one eye to see, the other feel", but his dance seems visual rather than visceral, groundbreaking in that it draws the eye into thinking and reviewing our expectations of dance and what it might be attempting to communicate. It is a strange and enticing blend of dance theatre derived from the bygone era of commedia delle'arte and the science of today's physics.

Matchbox Magic: Dance as Film
jonathan marshall: daniel belton, nz choreographer & filmmaker | Realtime Arts | Magazine | Issue 92
DANIEL BELTON IS A FILMMAKER AND CHOREOGRAPHER BASED IN SOUTHERN NEW ZEALAND WHOSE WORKS HAVE BEEN SHOWN AT NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL DANCE AND FILM FESTIVALS IN CHRISTCHURCH, OTAGO (WHERE BELTON RESIDES), EMPAC IN NEW YORK AND ELSEWHERE. BELTON FORMED GOOD COMPANY ARTS IN 1997, PRODUCING FILM, INSTALLATION AND LIVE PERFORMANCE.

Although the company's output is diverse, its film work is pervaded by a sense of aesthetic historicism. Matchbox (2008), for example, draws on the imagery of the Bauhaus, Futurism, vaudeville, the films of Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton. Earlier films allude to Albrecht Durer, Renaissance perspective and Commedia del'arte.

Belton acquired an interest in art history at an early age through his father, painter Peter Belton, who serves as designer on most of Good Company's projects. Indeed, Belton considers the sculptural, painterly aesthetic of many of his films as representing a 'return' in his career. "I left high school with high marks in art", he explains, "and I was heading to Canterbury University to study fine arts, but had auditioned for the New Zealand School of Dance. They called me up and said: 'You're in!' I thought that while my body was young I should do this—and I could come back and go to art school later." Belton graduated in 1990, subsequently dancing with many companies in New Zealand and internationally, including the Douglas Wright Company, Arc Dance and Tanz Gervasi, Austria.

In 1997 Belton settled in Dunedin in the south of New Zealand and founded Good Company. "I wanted to start making my own work, not only for theatre spaces, but to fuse the visual arts with dance, sculpture and kinetic art."Good Company's recent work can be divided into two main series. The most recent triptych culminated in Matchbox, growing out of the companion pieces Game (2004) and Reset (2006). These are the most closely related of Belton's films, shot in misty, halo-infused black-and-white reminiscent of German Expressionist cinematography. Focused around the idea of a kind of combined puppet show and game-playing machine, figures interact by pushing buttons, arranging poles, dancing with each other or animating miniature figures and vaudevillian bands. Belton's earlier trilogy—Soma Songs (2006), Seismos (2006) and After Dürer (2007)—dealt with problems of space and the articulation of line and form through movement within a set of virtual, perspectival frames, or across a multifaceted and effectively multidimensional sculptural object. Dancers crawled over planes and into inverted relationships, as in the upside-down works of MC Escher.

"I was originally drawn in to theatre by puppet shows", Belton observes. "They are a filmic window. It's like looking in the back of an old bellows camera. You open it up, it concertinas out, and it's like there's a little theatre in there, in the viewfinder. It's a miniature proscenium arch." Belton is keen to ensure that these relatively commonplace ideas about the relationship of film to theatre materialise in a complex—albeit still light and playful—mise en scène. The characters of Matchbox climb into and out of a graphed, perspectival space, its digitally added lines (provided by Jac Grenfell) converging on what would be the focal point for any one view. The performers are, in effect, rendered mechanical, inasmuch as they interact with the objects and materials presented to them by the flashing, almost Mondrian-like game device.

"[This machine] is also like the sound box of a musical instrument", adds Belton. A key part of Matchbox's alluring blend of time and reference is to be found in the wound-down score produced by Grenfell's digital decomposition of the music of Django Reinhardt and 1930s vaudeville. The game dings, crackles and pulses with these sounds, just as it produces pillars and squares, or offers spaces and lights with which the characters interact. Not only are several of these sonic and visual motifs coincident within Matchbox, but they perform the same dramaturgical function of rendering a machinic world of performance and of dancing from within an antiquated yet contemporary, partly-digitised format. Belton indeed goes so far as to shoot in digital video and reformat the image in 16 mm analogue film, even though in many cases his films are projected from a DVD dub.

It is this interest in bodies and forms whose motor force and activity seem derived from the logic of film and of the moving image, rather more than human, fleshy or three-dimensionally choreographic logic per se, which places Matchbox and its companion works close to the conceptual ideology of Bauhaus and Futurism. Like many dance film artists, Belton's interest in the form originally derived from his work on archiving his own productions as well as from producing live multimedia pieces like the stage production Soma Songs (2005).
"It was always frustrating because it was never like the live show", Belton admits. "But then there was something in that loss, as well as in the discipline of locking down your reading to one visual frame." Where some of Belton's live performances have multiple points of interest and a circus sense of order tipping into chaos (Fellini-like, notably in Belton's Commedia-influenced Soundings, 2000), his films are by contrast tightly focused on small groups in glowing, misty but well-defined hazes of light, or on crisp figures which stand out before a black background amidst architectural lines and shapes.

Recalling the ideas behind the extraordinary modernist marionettes and sleek, conical, monochromatically painted dolls designed by Sophie Tauber and Oskar Schlemmer, Belton insists that "working with the human body for film is like puppeteering. You craft a choreographic story with the bodies of the dancers you are working with, but in postproduction you revisit that. You can jump cut, speed things up, reverse things, slow them down, or you can layer them." Although Belton generates much of the material which he films by giving tasks to his performers, and sees them as active agents within the process of developing the work, nevertheless the philosophy of his approach explicitly denies agency to the dancer-characters of his films. The figures who dance across his screen are not particularly human, or even necessarily embodied per se. They are formal devices within a larger mise en scène. In Matchbox in particular, the game-play set up by uncertainty over the categories of human versus non-human and agency versus puppetry produces the humour and narrative arc of the work.

In the end though, Belton's preferred metaphor to describe his material is storytelling. "We're storytelling beings", he insists. "I try to make each film have enough layers to have many readings. With the way I choose my performers, I'm not trying to get a group of racehorses together. You've got people from all walks of life, different shapes and sizes. It's about drawing them out and allowing them to offer as much as they can. The theatre is like an engine for telling [many] stories." These narrative threads, forms, sounds and movements are unified through the medium of this machine, which gathers material along its lines of sight and sound, and then beams them out. "It's like the sound box of a musical instrument", observes Belton. "When you project film, you are projecting this information out. The soundbox from a guitar or a lute is also projecting sound out, and the theatre is projecting storytelling."

Matchbox's World Premiere was at the Otago Festival of the Arts, Dunedin NZ, October 2008. It was a finalist in the VideoDansa, Barcelona Prize 2009, IDN Festival, Barcelona, Spain and in the Official selection Dance on Camera Festival International Competition 2009, New York, USA.

Daniel Belton & Good Company, Matchbox, director, performer, designer, editor Daniel Belton, co-producer, performer Donnine Harrison, performers Richard Huber, Caroline Claver, Courtney Poulier, Tim Fletcher, Emmett Hardie, Kilda Northcott, director of photography, animations, sound Jac Grenfell, lighting, animation Nils Stroop, holography Ozrac Densky, art department Peter Belton etc; www.goodcompanyarts.com

Into Another Dimension by David Eggleton Oct 11-17 2008 NZ Listener
Daniel Belton’s mesmerising dance-film choreography is among the world’s best.

In the specialist area of video dance – or dance on film – Daniel Belton and his group of collaborators, known as Good Company, have, over the past six or seven years, established themselves among the world’s best. By the end of 2008, the Dunedin-based dancer, choreographer and director will have had his short films selected for more than 70 festivals, picking up a swag of awards, from Best Video Creation at the 2004 Canariasmediafest in Spain for Figures of Speech to Most Innovative Work at the 2008 International Festival of Video-dance in Naples, Italy, for After Dürer. This year, his films also appeared on the ABC network in Australia and on Channel 4 in the UK.

Belton has always been interested in the wonderful hybrid creations that can result from a crosspollination of art forms. At high school, he was keen on both sport and dance, as well as drawn to puppetry and painting. When he left school in the late 1980s, he was torn between going to art school and attending the New Zealand School of Dance in Wellington. Dance school won, and Belton danced with the Douglas Wright Dance Company before working with a range of dance companies in Europe. He returned to Dunedin in 1997 – with his partner, Donnine Harrison, and their daughter – and set up Daniel Belton and Good Company as an arts collective devoted to multimedia dance performance. Early dance performances enrolled artists as various as Anthony Ritchie (music), Kathryn Madill (banners), Violet Faigan (sculpture) and Michael O’Brien (bookbinding), while also incorporating moving images by Rachel Rakena and John Irwin.

The dance-theatre work Soundings represented the culmination of these early collaborations, with its magic toy shop and storybook ambience. It was, said Belton, “a big shift in scale … an opportunity to paint on a wide canvas”. Premiering at the 2000 Otago Festival of the Arts, Soundings was also staged later the same month at the Opera House in Wellington. Ambitious in presentation and expensive to produce, it seemed in some ways a small work that had been stretched, and served to confirm what subsequent works have made clear: he is essentially a master of the small scale. Soundings also seemed to revisit a lot of standard dance-theatre tropes: the rebellious harlequin, the moony pierrot, the effervescent Columbine.

Time for a shift in direction. This came with Henge (2001), Belton’s breakthrough digital film. Its severe abstract minimalism, trancelike jumpcuts and dancers who materialise and dematerialise to the urgent crackle of pulsing white noise proved the genesis for an original take on the dance-film genre. The best dance films don’t only record movement, but alter your experience of time and space in the process. So, although in some ways less immediate, less physical than live dance, dance on film can also be more physical, more fantastical, more vertiginous.

Belton’s films are like dreams of dancing, part anxiety, part elation, but they create their effects through unusual means. He has produced a series of nine films now, with the assistance of a talented crew that has included camera operator Jac Grenfell, composer Jan Bas Bollen and set designer Peter Belton (Daniel’s father), as well as a whole ensemble of dancers and actors. They find their inspiration in the foundations of 20th century art cinema: those flickery black and white silent films from Russia, Germany and the United States made by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton. The result is a sequence of beautiful, intimate, cabaret style chamber works, whose chiaroscuro mise-en-scènes polish the grime off the tarnished ideals of the 1920s and 1930s and restore their gleam, using the energies of dance.

Belton’s mythopoetic treatments take us back to the future as early filmmakers once saw it, only he employs advanced digital technology. Using Dunedin locations (such as the Art Nouveau-era railway station foyer and the Art Deco era former Chief Post Office), his films reboot retro-science fiction utopias and dystopias. Workers in uniforms dance out their struggles against control by a supreme engineer, a dancer in white overalls engages in a reeling Chaplin-esque walk while a glowing tracery of captured dance motion floats about him, or paired lovers leap like performing fleas up and over the kind of tubular scaffolding used in experimental modern dance in the 1960s.

There’s something genuinely revolutionary about the way the Belton dance aesthetic treats the camera itself as a biomechanical dancing machine possessed of an unblinking eye. Enmeshed in the nexus of what might be called a Dunedin arts movement, he’s established himself as a magician of dance, with mesmerising choreographic routines that encapsulate our 21st century predicament.

Vital Matchmaking
Review by Nigel Zega, Sat 11 Oct 2008 Otago Daily Times, Dunedin, Otago Festival of the Arts

Forget arranged marriages, speed dating, and Internet introductions. There's a new way to meet the partner of your dreams. Meet the Matchbox, a futuristic means of sorting out the wheat from the chaff in the dating game.

Matchbox, the latest film from the ever-fertile imaginations of Daniel Belton and Good Company, opened at the Metro Cinema last night. This is not so much a dance film, as Daniel and Co through the looking-glass portal running riot with science-fiction technology in homage to the past. Confused? Never mind. Get a ticket and line up with the eight young hopefuls heading for the dance hall and the chance of a romantic encounter.

Matchbox, written by Belton and wife/dancer/choreographer/co-producer Donnine Harrison, is the third in a trilogy of dance-based films that started with Game and Reset. It's a surreal experience, referencing silent cinema and video games, children's party games, and even Belton's own live dance theatre piece Soundings, presented at the 2000 Otago Festival of the Arts. Although Soundings was acclaimed, the cost of producing such shows is prohibitive, but by making a smart detour to digital film, Belton and his collaborators can now afford to create their own worlds with complete freedom of expression.

The world in Matchbox centres on a magic jukebox that pairs people with each other to see if they are suited. High technology features in flickering, jerky black and white as 1930s flappers and their would-be beaus line up in anticipation of finding true love. The eight dancers go through a series of tests and encounters, drawing heavily on mime and early theatre styles to tell their stories. No-one takes things too seriously, and fun is to the forefront in this strongly physical explosion of ideas. And guiding the whole show is the quietly confident Belton, the real-life matchmaker who brings together such talent. Matchbox screens tonight and tomorrow night.

Matchbox Metro Cinema, Dunedin 10-12 Oct, 2008 f*INK Entertainment Guide
Daniel Belton and Good Company have once again wowed the audiences with a thoroughly entertaining dance film. This latest work, seven months in the making, has a scratchy black-and-white 1930s look to it. With lashings of slapstick choreography, stage humour and expansive expression, the screen action is hardly idle for a second. Jump-cut editing and sped-up interludes create a pace similar to the Warner Bros and Tex Avery cartoons of the 1930s and 40s.

It's clear that Daniel Belton is exploring dances negative spaces as a filmic style. We see arms and legs, tubes and other objects carving into the screen space. An economical colour palette, combined with grainy textural forms and satisfying foley gives an elaborate decoration to Matchbox. Songs of the 1930s are woven into the soundtrack by Jacdaniel, full of blips, squeaks, techno fills, and glitchy distortion. Imagine listeners on the other side of our galaxy hearing 'Stardust' by Hoagy Carmichael, with its bandwidth squeezed out of it, but including various cosmic artefacts picked up along the way. An oversized iTouch obelisk jukebox was, as a prop, a wondrous dramatic device. Psy-fi streaming beams of light introducing each of 14 sections of pushplay and gurgitating magical objects; rods and tubes, globes and glasses that added an abstract feel scouring the opaque murkiness like a delicate pot-scrub as the dancers combated and canoodled.

There were appreciative aahhs from the audience as the dancers bobbed an swayed aplenty. The cast really seemed to be having a good time, laughing and joking around. "We had a really great team of people to work with" says Belton. To be sure! Local luminary dancers and character actors delighted their homies. Daniel B and his Good Company can be proud of this latest venture. They are being hailed around the world at festivals as this f*INK goes to print.

Flicker
By David Eggleton New Zealand Listener Magazine Nov 18-24 2006

Modern Dance can seem like dancers’ secret business, a closed circuit employing a code that’s hard to crack. And dance presented on film loses the immediacy and physicality that you get from dance live. Athletes of the Imagination - five short films presented as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts - triumphantly overcomes such objections, not by denying that modern dance is an abstract and rarefied display, and that film distances and filters out physical presence, but by emphasising and playing off these perceptions.

Daniel Belton and Good Company are a loose conglomerate of talents who assemble for dance-theatre projects. Belton as choreographer maps out the structure to which others bring their distinctive contributions: in this case, dancers Donnine Harrison and Kilda Northcott, actor Richard Huber, digital camera operator Jac Grenfell, sound engineer Nigel Jenkins and clothing designer Juliet Fay are among the contributors.

With its minimalist grey-on-grey palette, and with performers clad in Grecian tunics or white overalls, this is dance theatre that reaches back to pioneers Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, whose motifs of fluttering veils are registered through the blurry movement of costumes made to look phosphorescent. Clued-up balletomanes may spot references to the Platonic forms of the Bauhaus Movement. Some of us will pick up evocations of German Expressionist movies of the 1920s. Everyone will get the giddy acrobatics, wild swayings and balancings that the silent greats Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin have made familiar.

This body of work is a tribute to early modernism: the utopian promises that technology, astronomy and physics after Einstein seemed to offer. It’s done as a kind of pantomime, but the gesticulations and gyrations are supported by a digital layering of images and sounds. And within modernist grids and cubes, crowds of tiny dancers sketch geometrical theorems - vortexes, vectors, lines of force - or dart about like sparks of electricity. As the films cleverly compress and expand time and space, you can’t help getting caught up in the whirling conviction of it all as Belton pays homage to that long-ago optimism that still resonates, however faintly, for our jaded 21st-century moment.

ATHLETES OF THE IMAGINATION, Rialto Theatre, Dunedin.

A Workout for the Mind
Athletes of the Imagination, Rialto Cinema, Dunedin Otago Festival of the Arts 2006 October Fri 13th,
by Nigel Zega, Otago Daily Times.

Daniel Belton and Good Company go from strength to strength. Their latest offering, Athletes of the Imagination, is a series of five haunting films, collectively breaking new ground. Its a compendium of dance, music, film graphics and creativity, referencing genius from Len Lye to futuristic interactive games and space exploration. It’s dance Jim, but not as we know it.

One viewing is not enough to take in the half of it, and the packed Rialto screening was pin-drop silent in concentration. Each film had a long list of credits. These are team efforts, but at the helm is Belton. Different films share common dance riffs, linking the works. The process of film is used not to record, but to create.

Figures of Speech offers an interactive game, involving humans in sliding puzzles, balancing movement and space. Game takes us further into the surreal, where a holographic game fights back and takes over its player, with satisfying results. Reset will be familiar to serious chess players. The trauma and torment surrounding a hard-fought board game are expressed by players, hopefully making emotional progress. There’s frenetic fun too, with some gloriously skilled comic dance.

Soma Songs, the longest piece, stretches the imagination the most. It needs an open mind and full attention, as the ideas come faster than you can take them in. It goes beyond physical space into an imaginative dimension, where nightmare and dreams mix, and ethereal figures weave graphic blueprints in weightless space.

Seismos, the final piece, echoes many of the devices used, but is the first to use female dancers. Despite similar moves and techniques, it makes for a rounded ending. Give your mind a workout. See Athletes of the Imagination on tonight or tomorrow afternoon.

Electronic Wizardry at Work
Soma Songs, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, June 24, 25 and 26, 2005 by Alison East. Otago Daily Times.

‘Daniel Belton and Jan Bas Bollen enter the packed auditorium and seat themselves at their sound desks. The highly complex musical “weaponry” includes programmed laser beams, computers, microphones and bass guitar, rocks and tuning forks. Behind them, on three large screens, the video images appear as a series of jerky, sporadic, changing and evolving shapes and figures.

A rock wall is navigated by two dancers who jump around the page like human hieroglyphs. We become like archaeologists mining a dark interior landscape of stone. The sonics created by Belton and Bollen sound like chisels on rock, cut through by other sounds, as a hand is passed over the laser beam. This is the Belton teams’ most mature work yet. I say team, because one cannot help but marvel at the integration of art forms at play here. Videographer Jac Grenfell is also a master of 3D animation software and digital image re-sampling.

Other important artists include sound engineer Nigel Jenkins, international guest dancer Tom Ward, and artist Peter Belton. Producer Donnine Harrison has helped put it all together. There are too many important others to mention. The highly innovative 65 - minute event of moving geometry, building pulsating rhythms and shifting light takes us on a strange genealogical journey through mathematical and architectural time, leaving us floating on the final structure like humans lost in space. Well done, team.’

Soma Songs
Soma Songs, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Jun 24, 25 and 26, 2005 Dunedin Entertainment Guide.

This stunning programme of dance, architecture and sound showed recently at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. It is a collaboration between Daniel Belton and his Good Company of international and local guests. Three screens of video projection showed dance and geometrical investigation, with poignant animation by Jac Grenfell, and twisting, every-space-covered dance by Belton and Tom Ward (UK). This projected dance is not ‘real’ dance as Belton comments, “you can’t hear the breathing”) but perhaps this is ‘augmented’ dance, where the dance is slowed, or quickened, there are close-ups and animated shapes. Yet the experience was nearly as good - your eyes are drawn back and forth across the performance area immersing the audience in the spectacle. Jan Bas Bollen from Amsterdam was the Mozart Fellow here in 2002, and the live sound performance from himself and Daniel Belton gave the performance its groove and magic. Their laid-back approach and alien instrumentation was spot-on, as they played up to the screens. Nigel Jenkins’ is again lending his technical sound expertise to Good Company, and Aduki’s dancers’ costumes were belled in the pants like Gene Kelly’s sailor suits. Dunedin is fortunate to be home to such a talented crew. It is the networking of creative people that makes Good Company and impressive unit making highly original works. Fantastic!

Ghosts in the Machine by David Eggleton New Zealand Listener Magazine, 23 Jul 2005

At the beginning of Soma Songs, two male dancers, dressed in white overalls, move in nimble fashion along the wall of a limestone quarry, not so much representing labourers at work as symbolising a line of energy, like a ripple of light, being emitted by the high white wall. Soma Songs is a multimedia touring dance performance that takes the form of digital video projected onto three separate screens and was supported at its premiere by a platform of live music. It's part of an ongoing series of dance works – the 15th in 12 years – put together by choreographer Daniel Belton and his collaborators, known collectively as Good Company.

Belton's recent pieces show an obsession with what might be termed technological mysticism (that intersection where the ghost in the machine blends with the human spirit), which is expressed through (or compressed into) the power of dance. Soma Songs, all film sequences, resembles something sewn together out of scraps of gossamer: it's delicate and ethereal.

A sawn block of stone becomes by turns a stumbling block, a puzzle block, a juggling block and a building block: it's a cosmic cube, a cornerstone of the universe. The dancers (Belton and visiting Brit Tom Ward), positioned mostly as white blurred figures against a dark background, so spectral that they resemble holograms, dance rings around the cube like forces that have been released from within it.

The music, put together by Dutch composer Jan-Bas Bollen, evokes core samples, sound waves, a planetary hum. There are scrapings on stones, the clack of sticks. Bass guitar thrummings are augmented by tapped tuning forks, and hands being waved over infra-red sensors to trigger bursts of white noise. Digital artist Jac Grenfell fills in the video screens with computer-assisted designs of half-circles, circles, angles and grids: the cube turns into a 3D jigsaw, its component parts disassembled then reassembled by the dancers.

These dancers, made to vibrate mesmerisingly like hummingbirds, or stage fits like psychotics in strait-jackets, pull their own dance phrases apart, then rebuild them, their time-lapse movements reminiscent of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's gridded photographic sequences designed to accurately demonstrate human movement. By the end, the dancers arrive at a state of anti-gravity still clinging to their cube mother-lode, which now resembles a spacelab. Two figures in space, they are stranded there without lifelines. The effect is haunting, and brilliantly realised.

Circular Linear Motion - Expanding, Contracting
Light and Sound
By Bronwyn Judge DANZ Magazine, Sept 2005, Daniel Belton and Good Company, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Soma Songs is an unusual and riveting work involving acclaimed international artists from various media. Unlike conventional dance performances, the live element is the presence of the technical wizards: image resampler and projectionist New Zealander Jac Grenfell and audio resampler and composer Jan-Bas Bollen from Holland. British dancer Tom Ward and Daniel Belton greatly add to the success of the piece when they appear as digital footage.

It would not do it justice to call it simply a dance work, although the performance is devised by choreographer Daniel Belton and Good Company. There is in fact no live dance as such, Daniel and Jan-Bas provide live music, using sensor sound to accompany an intricate engrossing film show that covers three large projection screens. The screens are filled with examples of Greek architecture, building blocks and dancing figures in a dizzying progression of morphed images retaining just enough information to be recognisable and yet altered to a degree that requires an audience’s serious focus and involvement to read.

The most impressive aspect of this performance is the superb integration of every element into the whole. Even the graphics of the title are spelt out in computer-generated circles and lines for the opening screen shot. There is an intriguing play between what is real and what is virtual and this is carried through different layers of the work. Dancers spectacularly spin upside down with ease while set design modules are carried as if they are weighty blocks of Oamaru stone and are shifted with apparent difficulty.

It is essentially a monochromatic piece but the senses are assaulted, such is the speed and complexity with which the artwork is projected. A shorter programme would lose nothing in interest but would leave an audience a little less stunned. While the Royal New Zealand Ballet with horror ballets like Dracula seek to attract young male viewers, which is the apparent audience demographic for horror films, Belton has taken another tack entirely but with a similar audience in mind. Soma Songs could be termed intellectual in content. It doesn’t really touch the lush landscape of the emotions and is definitely a masculine work. The next project in the pipeline is apparently a female version. It is tantalising to anticipate whether it would do as much for defining gender specific dance as this choreography of architecture and the human form in constant circular and linear motion, cradled by waves of expanding and contracting light and sound.

Lumin: a Visual Masterpiece
Reviewed by Sandra Grieg, The Press, Christchurch October 2002

Opening shots of the windswept hills of Lindis Pass with their muted colours of ochre, brown, clay, and tussock gold, began the beautiful exploration that was Lumin, the new art film from Daniel Belton and Good Company.

This visual masterpiece, 2.5 years in the making, was a collaboration of artists of the highest calibre both internationally and nationally. All facets of the production, dance movement, sound, costume, lighting, and film technology were of outstanding quality. Intertwined, they made for an hypnotic and totally absorbing experience. The luminous white light combined with glorious movement and soundscape bombarded the senses in a mysterious and ethereal way.

Also presented were two previously released films. Henge first shown in 2001 at the New Zealand International Film Festival, is a surreal and magical film, using film technology and effects, with emphasis on the circle and resonance of stretched plucked strings and ritualistic movement. Manipulation of images created a new dimension for the imagination. This abstract work needed no explanation, just the will to relax and absorb.

In complete contrast was Wireless danced by Belton and Donnine Harrison. An accessible and humorous trip down memory lane for two innocent would-be lovers, and the way we were. Complete with a nostalgic musical score, sepia tone flashbacks, and smooth flowing choreography beautifully executed, this dance turned into a film was a winner.

A Fantastical Journey into Belton’s Surreal World
Soundings - Daniel Belton and Good Company. Opera House Wellington,
Ann Hunt Sunday Star Times Oct 2000

To say that Daniel Belton has discovered unplumbed depths in this mysterious and magical work would not be entirely true, nor would it do this innovative and daring choreographer justice. He did however need a vessel seaworthy enough for a longer and a stronger, more beautiful one than Soundings would be hard to imagine.

Belton and his extremely good company have created a surreal world complete unto itself, one that is so satisfying and multi-layered the longer you watch it the more you discover. Cross-disciplined, it effortlessly bridges dance and theatre, visual art, couture design, music and film. From the moment Simon O’Connor places his fool’s hat upon his head, we embark on a fantastical journey that takes us to the heart of ourselves and back. Are we led by fools and visionaries, or harlequins and jesters? Do we journey logically or with blind faith, and does it really matter?

Belton has worked with visionary theatre artist, Lindsay Kemp and his influence is very apparent. Yet there is also a kinder, more optimistic intelligence evident. The closeness and need for family pervades the work, particularly in the powerful dance for the Crippled Man (Kristian Larsen). The choreography is a collaborative effort. Belton has enabled his nine dancer/actors to shine, which they do brilliantly. English visitor Tom Ward’s dance lineage is very apparent. But such is the cohesion of the cast and the work that the ensemble is always paramount.

The production values are impeccable. The splendid partnership of of designers Peter Belton and Kim Garrett provides an abstract, yet oddly solid space and the imaginative music and sound design of Belton and Nigel Jenkins perfectly encapsulates it. Images of candle-lit Victorian theatres and Picasso’s Blue Period paintings imbue the dreamscape with a melancholy attachment while Tanya Carlson’s capricious costumes hint at story book archetypes without dictating to the audience’s imagination.

Belton has collaborated with his dancers and actors to produce a work that is profoundly affecting. The image of a boat as a metaphor for life’s journey, could in less capable hands, be banal. Here it is given new and shimmering resonance.

Soundings - dance theatre making current
Directed/Choreographed by Daniel Belton. Regent Theatre. James Hadley Theatre News Magazine Oct 2000

A commedia del'arte Fool appears in the spotlight, his white face an enigmatic Buster Keatonesque mask. A huge coin is produced and dropped through a slot - with a thundering clunk - into the bowels of the theatre, and the curtain slowly rises to mechanical sound effects, revealing figures enshrouded in smoke. Every once upon a time there comes along a piece of it weaves in the actuality of live performance, reminds you of the childhood wonder that inspires most theatre practitioners towards their vocation. 'Soundings' was nothing short of an inspiration. A beautiful dream made real before your very eyes (incomparable to the technical wizardry of film). Director / choreographer Daniel Belton courageously eschewed the self-referential pretensions of post-modernism, and fashionable attitudes of cynical realism, to create a flight of fantasy.

In my opinion, this work was far and away the highlight of the Otago Arts Festival. What could be more appropriate for the context than a world-class piece of entertainment which originated right here in Dunedin? I realise I rave. But for this reviewer, 'Soundings' stands out as a personal favourite out of all the live performance I have seen in New Zealand. Both as theatre and as dance, this was a most successful work, blending multi-disciplinary elements into a beautiful unity. Belton's previous choreographic work has impressed with its lyricism and technical assuredness, but 'Soundings' is an ambitious leap up to a far greater vision. Rather than any sense of his imagination being stretched by this increase in scope, its virtuosic somersaults were a revelation. Here choreography was the foremost part of a surreal theatrical world, populated by entrancing characters who have been likened to Picasso's acrobats, or the more carnivalesque figures in Fellini's films.

Peter Belton's set was best described as an Expressionistic advent calendar, mysteriously swathed in drifting smoke. Yet really the Victorian grandeur of the Regent Theatre was as much the setting, turned into a music box with a mellifluous moving painting. Lighting, content, soundscape and characters were all painted with a sfumato touch which evoked but did not define, allowing the audience to collaborate with their own interpretations. The overall effect was like a dream inspired by various children's storybooks, although specific references were wonderfully subtle and allusive. These were broad ranging, and as complex as the subtexts and sublimations of adult dreams.

The company wore evocative carnivalesque costumes by Tanya Carlson. These resonated with commedia del'arte or story-book characters; but resisted finite interpretation, and were marvellously complementary to the movement-style and character of each performer. Every one of these had an impressively distinct persona, with their own manner and tone of physicality, influenced by past work and personal styles. Like the different characters with which a child endows their toys, each dancer was a colourful individual, creating movement collages of delightful variety simply by passing across the stage. The dancers each deserve mention: Donnine Harrison, Tom Ward, Simon Ellis, Bronwyn Judge, Melanie Hamilton, Kristian Larsen, Kelly Nash, and a modestly choreographed Daniel Belton. The standard of dancing was uniformly high, blending an apparently effortless grace with intensely passionate investment in each move. Though Belton was obviously something of a magician behind the scenes, this role was most closely taken up onstage by Simon O'Connor, as the 'Fool' whose sounding out his environment directed much of the performance. Both O'Connor and Richard Huber, playing an equally commedia del'arte-like clown (but no simple stock 'type'), were perfectly cast. Two of Dunedin's finest performers, the simple precision of their work was an asset to the production.

The recurring use of a poignant theme by Arvo Part set a tone of heightened reality, complemented by soundscapes by Nigel Jenkins. In my ignorance of the technical details of dance, Belton's choreography stood out for its balance of abstract, aesthetically pleasing moves with those which lent themselves to emotional/narrative readings. Beautiful solos and passionate duets were seamlessly unified with more theatrical interactions, never overburdened with definite narrative, but integrating just enough whimsical incident. There was a wealth of dance vocabulary and beautiful images in this piece which suggest Belton has the vision of a true artist.

The surreal use of props such as an upturned boat and electric cables fitted the fantastical way in which the space was inhabited. Copious use of smoke, subtle lighting (by Kim Garrett) which shifted like cloud-shadows, and gigantically amplified sound effects augmented the sense of mystery. The magical delight of the piece can be exemplified by its ending, when each character walked into a giant book held open by the Fool, who then closes it up and walks off with it. The spell was over, leaving an audience too entranced to believe in trapdoors.

The Miniature Rules in this Imaginative,
Spirited Show
Soundings. Daniel Belton and Good Company, Opera House Wellington.
Reviewed by Jennifer Shennan, The Evening Post Oct 2000

One of the dancers in this show wears a gorgeous patchwork dress which seems by the end of the evening to symbolise the whole of Soundings - exquisite tiny pieces stitched together which we have the pleasure of hunting through to recognise, in the fragments, old loved garments. This is a prismatic kaleidoscope world in which the miniature rules. We glimpse characters in a travelling troupe, with a few clues to their identity. But Belton has deliberately resisted organising them into a single narrative, instead choreographing a dance of small things. We don’t always know where we’re going but we do know we’re all in the same boat. Images float by from the paintings of Breugel and Bosch and Tiepolo. A Venetian Carnival scene gives way to Fellini’s La Strada and Alain-Fournier’s The Lost Domain. From the Grimm Brothers we see the little Match Girl and The Goose girl. There’s a whiff of Sendak, another of Tienniel, all suggesting that the child’s sense of logic and view of the world are at least as valid as adults’ constructed versions.

The set, designed by Peter Belton, is a giant peepshow book, with characters in fetching costumes by Tanya Carlson, hiding in little cameo cupboards. The props are enchanting. A violin played like a mortar and pestle, a quill pen that tries to write but can only find moving bodies or flesh as manuscript, crutches for a 16th century cripple and a set of jump leads to spark us into the present. Nigel Jenkins’ soundscape is a seamless marvel of the sea, the wind and bird song, with Arvo Part’s Fratres and catchy Renaissance dances, and always the ticking of passing time.

This spirited show, with a cast of nine distinctive dancers, is fresh from success in the Otago Festival of the Arts.

Web Sight Soundings, by Daniel Belton and Good Company, Opera House, Wellington. Jennifer Shennan, The Listener Nov 2000

A dance dream, Soundings was commissioned by the Otago Festival of the Arts for performance in Dunedin and then brought to Wellington, being done just twice in each place. Choreographed by Daniel Belton and performed by nine dancers of his Good Company, with actor Simon O’Connor playing the Fool, it is a work of wonder and whimsy, of echo and memory, a twilight dance without a plot, more foreplay than the other. Relying on an atmospheric text rather than a consummated narrative, it invokes such questions as "what does happily ever after mean?", "Which star is Grandad living on now?" and "Where do Hansel and Gretel go when we've finished reading about them?"

The action revolves around a troupe of commedia dell’arte-like characters on the road, but there is no particular destination, nor does there have to be. The use of several time and depth-sounding devices suggests that time marches on, yet stands still, too. There are echoes here of Lewis Carrol, Mary (The Borrowers) Norton and perhaps M C Escher: it’s the kind of thing that can change into something else before your eyes. Belton and his dancer wife Donnine Harrison clearly have little children and are sharing experiences in a way that suggests that theatre, art and domestic life are plaited. The soundscape, engineered by Nigel Jenkins, is mesmerising, offering further proof that Belton is increasingly a catalyst for other New Zealand artists (he has previously commissioned scores from Anthony Ritchie).

Tanya Carlson’s costumes are a delight , the props are stunning and admirably risky, and the final image of each character waving from the three-story-high peepshow book designed by Peter Belton is indelible.

The standout performers are Daniel Belton himself as a tumbling clown and Bronwyn Judge in electric red shoes, though any member of the company would stand out if they had the same chance in cameo solos. This is a spider’s web dance - not ours to touch, and certainly not to unravel, just to marvel at the gossamer.

Choreographer Realises Potential
Soundings. Regent Theatre. Otago Daily Times, Suzanne Renner Oct 2000

Soundings, an intriguing and whimsical dance-theatre work by Daniel Belton and Good Company, which premiered at the Regent Theatre last night, marks an impressive leap of artistry.

Small elegant performances choreographed by Belton in the past carried a hint of what might emerge with time and opportunity, so to see the realisation of this potential on a larger scale was satisfying. The attention to aesthetic detail in all aspects of the show has resulted in a magical creation that is pleasing on many levels. An atmosphere of nostalgic charm is created by interesting lighting effects, a haunting musical score, a playhouse set constructed like an Advent calendar, and a cast costumed as Victorian mime characters.

A Fool (Simon O’Connor) initiates the action and then stalks the stage mysteriously listening for ‘soundings’. His targets are a group of innocents, who are manipulated to enact a series of strange happenings in surrealistic mode. As the Fool’s assistant Richard Huber was delightfully eccentric and comical. To balance the acting, dance sequences are threaded through the work. Although its overall statement might have been perplexing to some, a creditable feature of this work was its sense of progression and completeness. Belton has created an unusual spell-binding dance work.

Forging a New Direction in Dance
Soundings, Daniel Belton and Good Company, Opera House, Wellington. Jenny Stevenson, The Dominion Oct 2000

Dunedin-based choreographer Daniel Belton is seeking to establish a new path in New Zealand dance with his work Soundings, a theatrical and visual spectacle where dance creates the ambience.

The Good Company is a collection of fine dancers. Dressed in the colourful garb of a commedia troupe without the masks, they perform with idiosyncratic movement that goes a long way to establishing their characters. They are discovered and revealed by a nautical character and his trusty scribe who are conducting depth soundings.

There is no narrative to the work as such - it evolves in a meandering series of episodic vignettes linked or dissolved by the soundings couple who orchestrate the action. An imposing set of great height contains nine doors which open to reveal symbolic objects such as stones, an egg and a chalice which are incorporated into the choreography. A gentle humour which is neither mocking nor satirical but merely a sort of understated slapstick underscores the choreographic intent. As a result there are no belly-laughs but a layering of visual gags with just a hint of pathos creates a feel-good atmosphere and endears the characters to the audience.

The work goes a long way to forging a new direction in contemporary dance. It is replete with colour, theatrical images and fine dance with strong characterisations by all the performers. Daniel Belton’s voice is one that will no doubt be heard a lot more in the future.

Chanelling Joy
By David Eggleton, New Zealand Listener Magazine, Aug 14 1999
Concertina (whakaopi/to fold), choreographed by Daniel Belton, Good Company, Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

A fragment for three performers danced in a setting that might have been the corner of some vast and possibly infinite library out of a Jorge Luis Borges short story, Concertina was an exquisite miniature, as delicate as a tissue of rice paper printed with a Zen poem. Daniel Belton, Donnine Harrison and Sean Feldman, dressed by designer Tanya Carlson in identical long pleated white dresses, at first resembled whirling dervishes, but, as they spun and delved and plucked at imaginary books and then gave little leg-flicks, they began to seem more like librarians hard at work.

Wrapped in their tunics of white and equipped with short feathery haircuts, each had an angelic delicacy, their long pleated skirts rustling like wings. But, when they shed these outer skirts, like discarded wing casings, they began to seem less like priestly librarians and more like fluttering insects, floating delicately, swaddled in filmy filaments of cotton and silk.

Moving with waxy flexibility in front of artist Violet Faigan’s screens of books - pages outermost and pleated and shaped to resemble the cylinders of industrial machinery - the three dancers were the spirit of a beehive or wasp nest: tiny flying insects tunneling with finely calibrated movements through some crumbling autumnal moment, some Proustian recollection of time past. The symbolic resonance was underscored and confirmed by composer Anthony Ritchie’s music, introduced by the murmer of cicadas and a scrap of melody squeezed from a concertina, and then picked up by the mellow timbre of a violin and their crisp notes of a piano. Altogether a thing of scrupulous execution, a calculated register of tremors.

Concertina Directed by Daniel Belton. Performed at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
THEATRE NEWS Aug 1999. Review by Alys Longley and James Hadley

Concertina was publicised as a multi-media performance, involving twelve artists in different media. The dance component was very much where attention was focused, and where attention is focusing increasingly thanks to a string of ambitious dance projects (such as Shoal Dance and Leaf, both 1998), staged at the Art Gallery by Daniel Belton and collaborators. Belton has now consolidated such pursuits in his formation of the charitable trust ‘Daniel Belton and Good Company’, which aims to expand on opportunities for collaborative projects between Dunedin artists of many media.

Concertina takes the concept behind the word - usually used in relation to something folding, like the wind box on the instrument, or a paper chain being folded out - and expands it towards its most creative interpretation. The intriguing poster for the show featured Belton as if wearing a huge cone-shaped skirt, a concertina of folded pages. In performance, the three dancers wore a more movement-compatible interpretation of this costume idea, designed by Tanya Carlson. The flowing concertina skirts operated like kinetic sculptures through their use by the dancers.

Sculptor Violet Faigan designed the enthrallingly creative set. Large friezes of what first appeared to be carved poles, akin to the undulations of ornate table legs, turned out, on closer inspection, to be many books, covers opened out against the wall. The opened out pages where painstakingly folded into intricate origami concertinas, juxtaposed with each other across the frieze. Lighting by Jamie Nevill accentuated this elaborate construction.

Prominent Dunedin composer Anthony Ritchie composed the piece’s score, a chamber piece featuring violinist Paula Smart and pianist Terrence Dennis. Ritchie’s musical landscape was sympathetic to the dance, helping to evoke journey and transformation. Videographer John Irwin was another background presence in the piece, whose graceful slow-motion footage of the performance was projected on the side walls of the gallery.

The dance performance itself was a beautiful addition to the body of work created by Daniel Belton and Donnine Harrison since their return from the United Kingdom. With visiting dancer Sean Feldman they created a choreography full of the joy and breath of movement, and the growth of inspiration and flight. Their interpretation of the concertina concept centered on the intake of air between a concertina’s folds, alike to a lung breathing in, and the vitalising embodiment of creative energy. The programme helped make sense of such themes, stating: ‘ In breathing life back into something that had lost its energy and awakening of the heart occurs. The heart, having its own intelligence, awakens the soul.’ It also quoted writer Ben Okri: ‘...Statures become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.’ Such quotes are evocative of the feeling which the choreography achieved, incorporating balletic twirlings, the movements of birds in flight, and a sense of the transition from being anchored to finding a dance of hope and belonging. The three dancers excelled in their faultless synchronicity, whirling apart and recombining, akin to the folds of one concertina.

Beauty, Expression in Dance Performance
By Nigel Zega, Otago Daily Times, Monday Jun 22, 1998

Life must have been pretty grim for the first of Dunedin’s early settlers. But Daniel Belton’s collaborative dance project Leaf is more of a celebration of the good things about starting life in a new country after a long sea voyage.
Leaf, commissioned by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society as part of Otago’s 150th celebrations, follows a young couple arriving in New Zealand in Victorian times.
The duet danced by Belton and his partner Donnine Harrison is a joyous affair, from an atmospheric welcome to a strange land to the fun and learning to be shared with new experiences. Belton has a strong physical presence and even his most fluid movements show an uncanny precision and control. He is a powerhouse of energy and emotion, well-balanced by Harrison’s almost regal grace. Together they build on each other’s strengths, culminating in a performance of expression and beauty.

Belton has involved several Dunedin talents in the project. Haunting music from composer Anthony Ritchie is played by pianist Terrence Dennis, and striking costumes are by designer Tanya Carlson. A film of the dance project by producer John Irwin runs this month at the gallery, where there is an exhibition of artist Kathryn Madill’s prints and selected period cuttings in a hand-bound book by Michael O’Brien, and photographs by Andi Lohmann.

Shoal Dance by Daniel Belton; Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Reviewed by David Eggleton, New Zealand Listener, June 6 1998

Shoal Dance, choreographer Daniel Belton’s latest piece on video (following on from last year’s Insideout and Homing) was filmed and produced by Barrington West and Prue Donald and presented for a month at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

An ensemble of three (Belton, Donnine Harrison and Rachel Krische), clad in shimmering, loose-fitting tunics, whirl and spin like waves curling and collapsing in a tumult of surf and foam. They are celebrants of propulsive movement, energetic movers and shakers, whether loping along the beach at dawn, or shoulder-rolling, flexing and pivoting in a studio, or plunging into a swimming pool and drifting upwards, trailing clusters of white bubbles.

Theirs is not a aquacade of synchronised swimming, but a tentative search for natural forms and shapes: the vortex of purling water in a standing wave, the undertow of ocean currents, the curves of a tumbling paua shell. At once fragile and exuberant, stiff-necked and wonderfully free, Belton’s work, showing bodies traveling through space and time, and danced to violin music composed by Anthony Ritchie, is 15 minutes of packed lyricism.

Melt and Flow Reviewed by Jennifer Shennan Dance: NZ Listener Magazine Nov 8 1997
Daniel Belton - Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Two short works choreographed by Daniel Belton - his solo, Inside Out, and Homing, a duo danced by him and his (life and dance) partner Donnine Harrison - have recently been performed at the dunedin Public Art Gallery in their “Vernacular” series. Video of the dances was screened continuously in the gallery, except for several daily timeslots when they were performed live. Both works proved fully accessible to enthusiastic audiences of a wide age-range, suggesting that galleries elsewhere may feel encouraged to present similar performances relating to simultaneously exhibited work.

Belton makes dances that look like tai chi on fast-forward - seamless flow, in and around the vertical, towards and away from the horizontal, seemingly nonchalant about balance, yet impeccably weighted and centred at every moment. In this serene choreography, the bodies do not hurtle through space, fling themselves onto the floor or crash into one another as adversaries. Rather, they fold and roll, melt and flow, breathe and pause, sigh and yearn, smile, fold and roll, melt and flow...

The mesmerising trail of his work seems more like a river than a dance technique. We should not be fooled into thinking their is no technique, however. It is just that the work’s themes and aesthetic are what we are offered, not the sweat and tears of the process. All effort is disguised, and the necessary energy exactly judged, and so calmly performed that it is palpably good for you to watch.

Inside Out was an intriguing solo that literally brought the dancer, in a series of spirals, into physical contact with the life-size paintings surrounding him. Peter Belton, Daniel’s father, had produced a series of paintings of a male in motion - commencing with studies after Tiepolo and Rembrandt, but soon following his own brush and his own son. The accompanying percussive soundscape was recorded with river stones. It was a lovely meditative piece.

Homing, a longer work, took as its theme the memories and thoughts of home when away on the far side of the world. (Belton and Harrison are recently back in New Zealand after a five year stint pursuing successful dance careers in Europe. Belton spent the time principally in the Arc Dance Company, with director/choreographer Kim Brandstrup, whose work, The Sleeping Beauty, we will see next year from the RNZB.)

The booming Kakapo, the fluting Kokako, snatches of Telemann and the bagpipes of Scotland (or is that Dunedin?)
were interspersed with sequences by composer Martin Lodge. The mural by Kathryn Madill echoed as many and more fragments of thought and communication between hemispheres. Bird feather or writing quill, letters that keep thoughts warm, that help spell out plans of journeys. Harrison and Belton moved as one and I could have done with it three times over.

Looking Past the Southern Horizon
VERNACULAR: Recent work by Dunedin artists, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, to November 30. Reviewed by Helen Watson White. Sunday Star Times, Oct 26 1997

The Dunedin Public Art Gallery has assembled an impressive flotila of local craft and art in this multi-media show. The flagship of the fleet is a collaborative dance/video/art project based on the choreography of Daniel Belton. It is danced by Belton with Donnine Harrison, with music scores inspired by Otago University Mozart Fellows, Anthony Ritchie and Martin Lodge.

Twenty four performances of the two dance works, solo Insideout and pas-de-deux Homing Hokinga Mai, have been offered at the gallery during the season, and at other times play inside and outside the exhibition in Paul Sharapoff’s sensitively crafted video.

A searching, suggestive banner-painting by Kathryn Madill, also entitled Homing, makes continuous dialogue with the dance by concentrating on themes of journeying and connection. In both works, letter-writing (with a quill) makes bonds, in the Belton by physically joining two bodies and in the Madill by invisible suggestion spanning time and black space. The power of the symbolism is so great that a handwritten letter assumes the importance of a ship, whale or light plane in Madill’s deliberate but whimsical distortion of scale. The whole presentation has a circular feel, in that these two reflections of each other are positioned by the entrance/exit: You come back to them after a small trip around the world.

By the time you’ve taken in Peter Belton’s large dynamic body-drawings, you feel as if you’ve perceived the dance works not just in two dimensions (on wall or screen) but also an illusory third (the video giving an impression of depth through double imaging), and a fourth dimension of sense-filled time.