Review: Pepe – a dance video work in which moths flutter against the cosmos
Erin Harrington reviews Pepe, presented by Good Company Arts, at the Cloisters studio, as part of Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre’s Matariki programming, Tuesday 10 June, 2025.
Pepe is a 15-minute dance video work, although that sounds a little reductive for something that combines experimental digital media, filmed contemporary dance (kanikani) and taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instrument) performances, animated elements, costuming, and raranga (weaving) into a hypnotic and fascinating whole.
This latest award-winning offering from the internationally acclaimed Good Company Arts, led by artistic director and Arts Foundation Laureate Daniel Belton and producer Donnine Harrison, explores the story of Hineraukatauri, the atua (deity) of musical instruments (particularly melodic flutes like the pūtōrino). The masculine and feminine expressions of the atua are performed impeccably by dancer Nancy Wijohn, with support from dance kaiāwhina Kelly Nash. Wijohn uses exquisite raranga pieces, woven from harakeke by Lisa Harding, Cathy Payne and Corabelle Summerton of the Ōtautahi-based Kahu Collective, curving them behind her back like a carapace, fluttering long silky threads like wings. Renowned taonga pūoro artists Mahina-Ina Kingi-Kaui, Arts Foundation Laureate Ariana Tikao, Dr Ruby Solly and Alistair Fraser appear too, providing music ranging from strongly syncopated percussive sequences to delicate, ethereal flute, the click and breath of the music all augmented by deep, thrumming sonic textures. It’s a who’s who of creative collaboration and innovation, and a particular celebration of the artistry of wāhine Māori.
The cinematography makes use of dark, oval shapes on an inky black field that shape the frame, a recurring motif of many of GCA’s works. There’s a cosmic feel to them: they are both a seed and the sweep of the galaxy, an egg and the mouth of wide oceanic spaces, compression and release. In this work they also allude to the curved and elongated cocoon of the case moth, or pūriri moth, a shape also seen in the pūtōrino. Through digital compositing Wijohn is multiplied, her many selves dancing in rhythmic synchronicity. Her movements marry firm, sweeping gestures and footwork that draw from kapa haka with angular flicks, sweeps and torsion that evoke acts of weaving, or diving, or pulling, the moth popping out from its cocoon or scuttling about the tree. Vignettes move through darkness and towards hope, perhaps, or understanding, the traveller encountering challenges and obstacles along their way.
Like other GCA collaborations, the Pepe project dances between the intimate and the cosmic, the digital and the organic, the grounded and the transcendent. You can spend time following the movements of the dancer’s body, or tracing the elongated shapes of cocoons and instruments. You can watch the gentle drift of digital illustration that recalls nebulae, seafoam or the fingers of mycelial networks, all of which looks lovely on the brushed concrete wall onto which the video is projected. It gives everything a sense of spaciousness. The audience is invited to engage in quiet and creative reflection, to stop for a bit and sit within the Pepe’s textures. It’s a meditative work that doesn’t insist on a ‘correct’ interpretation, just shared moments of curiosity and wonder that respond to Matariki’s call for contemplation and connection.
I attend the work’s lovely opening screening and artist q&a. There’s soup, chat, a beautiful intro from the Arts Centre’s creative director Chris Archer. It opens with sung karakia, and then painterly footage of a dramatic coastline that shifts into a bird’s eye view of the ocean. Ariana Tikao and Mahina-Ina Kingi-Kaui meet these images with a variety of melodic and percussive taonga pūoro. The movement of the waves becomes a geometric, almost abstracted rhythmic pattern that is later echoed in the nightwing burr of a pūrerehua (or bullroarer) that opens Pepe proper. After, Belton, Tīkao and Kingi-Kaui discuss the work’s exploration of geometry, the interplay between universal themes – and music and dance as universal languages – and Indigenous cosmologies. Along with weavers from the Kahu Collective, they speak about the life cycle of the case moth, and the way music, animation and design elements cohere, from shape and movement, to sound and texture. I’m particularly interested in the way Belton’s editing of the filmed dance elements, which are generated through acts of choreographic play with costume, instruments and woven elements, also has an improvisatory quality that mirrors the way musicians like Kingi-Kaui and Tikao compose in performance.
I am a little obsessed with the work created by Good Company Arts; I’ve previously written about Pōtaka Nautilus and Ad Parnassum Purapurawhetū, both presented in Ōtautahi within previous years’ Matariki programming at Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre, and have found them profoundly meaningful. There’s something deeply satisfying about the combination of so many arts practices and elements into a rich, layered work that invites the viewer in. Sometimes digital work can feel static, or distant, but this is lively and welcoming, its carefully woven cocoon a balm for the busy brain. The film is running for two weeks in the Cloisters studio, and I couldn’t recommend taking time to watch it, perhaps a few times, any more highly.
