The freedom to not make perfect sense
In Jessie McCall’s new contemporary dance work Big Low Dream, presented by Footnote New Zealand Dance, strange images collide, attention shifts and multiple realities coexist. We spoke with dancers Sasha Matsumoto and Caleb Heke about dream logic, moving through pain and creating a world that doesn’t need to explain itself.
Caleb Heke’s journey into dance began, quite literally, with a dream. But it wasn’t his own. A friend approached him at high school and told him she had dreamed of seeing him dancing onstage.
“She said, ‘I think you need to do dance.’ Prior to this, I’d never done dance before,” Caleb recalls. “So I listened, and I fell in love with dance from that point… and now here I am in a work about dreams. It’s full circle.”
Since studying contemporary dance at Unitec, Caleb (Ngāpuhi) has worked with companies including Atamira Dance Company and Body Island. His performance credits have taken him from Aotearoa to New York’s Joyce Theater, where he performed in Atamira’s legacy work Te Wheke.
Fellow performer Sasha Matsumoto began dancing at age three, moving from ballet into tap, jazz, musical theatre and eventually contemporary dance. After completing their own studies at Unitec, Sasha went on to work with artists including EKC Choreography, Brandon Ross and Presley Ziogas. Big Low Dream also reunites Sasha with Jessie McCall, after working together previously.
Welcome to the dream
Big Low Dream looks to dream logic – unruly, queer and ethically imaginative – as a way of searching for meaning amid overlapping crises. Paradises slip their frames, unexpected pleasures sit alongside the unthinkable, and spectacle flirts with collapse.
For Caleb, entering the work is much like trying to remember a dream after waking up: its emotional logic remains clear, even when its individual parts don’t add up.
“It’s like having a dream where my mum was a tiger and my dog was my nana,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense when you wake up, but in your dream, it makes total sense.”
The work unfolds through a series of shifting vignettes or “little pockets of fever dreams”, carrying the dancers and audience between different worlds and states of attention.
Sasha sees a connection between that structure and the experience of moving through life right now, with personal concerns, community needs and global events all competing for attention.
“It feels like there are so many demands on our attention,” they say. “I’m trying to grasp all these different aspects of life at once. Sometimes it feels like I can only give attention to one thing, and then it quickly shifts to something else.”
Within that instability, however, there is also plenty of play.
“There’s a lot of fun, visual elements and choreographic choices,” Caleb adds. “There are lots of surprises within the choreography and the staging of the world. The audience is in for a good time.”
Freedom without explanation
Sasha’s artistic practice is interested in anti-binary ways of making and existing; an approach that feels closely aligned with the ambiguous world of Big Low Dream.
“I’m really interested in things not being so black and white,” Sasha explains. “Drawing from intangible, ambiguous ideas and feelings, and letting that inform who I am, what I do and how that translates into my practice.”
Dream logic offers permission for ideas to remain unresolved. For Sasha, that ambiguity can be both frustrating and freeing.
“Sometimes I feel like people don’t understand me, but there’s also freedom in letting go of that,” they say. “Freedom to exist without trying to be understood, and without trying to understand myself either. Not having that pressure.”
That same freedom is present in a work that invites an audience to encounter its images and ideas without prescribing a single way to interpret them.
At its heart, Sasha suggests, Big Low Dream is about “dealing with pain in a really light way and a heavy way at the same time”.
“And that’s kind of what life is these days.”
Choreographing a whole world
In Jessie McCall’s practice, choreography encompasses far more than the movements made by dancers. Props, costumes, sound and staging all have their own equal role within the work.
“She believes in the object as much as the dancing body,” Sasha explains. “They have the same weight as each other.”
With sound design by Thomas Arbor and lighting design by Tony Black, every element helps construct the strange and shifting world of Big Low Dream. For the performers that means navigating props, other dancers, and multiple layers of movement and meaning.
“The dance is an important part, but it isn’t all that is important,” Caleb says. “There are so many other elements that go into the work.”
What Jessie ultimately places at the centre, he believes, is the person inside the performance.
“She wants to see the human onstage – the human body and the human being. People seeing people.”
Sasha agrees. Jessie’s work, they say, feels driven by something deeply personal: “Like a deep voice coming out of her, saying something really important that you can tell she really feels.”
There is no pressure to become a messenger for Jessie, however. Instead, the process has made room for each artist to arrive as their whole self. The dancers begin their days by checking in with one another and acknowledging what each person has available to give.
“We’re all humans,” Caleb says. “We have lives and things that happen outside of our nine to five, and we can bring that into the room.”
Many bodies, tiny movements
For Caleb, an athletic and expansive performer, the work’s smallest movements have presented the greatest challenge.
“I am such a big, long, tall, lots-of-hair dancer,” he laughs. “My struggle is being so minimal.”
Holding complete stillness can be harder for Caleb than executing something spectacular. “Jessie’s like, ‘Hey, you’re still moving.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m trying to be still!’”
Caleb’s wider practice explores how the body absorbs impact, stores memory and instinctively protects itself. Through his study of ConTact C.A.R.E, he has become interested in releasing those impacts and discovering new movement pathways through the bones.
“It’s about finding release and comfort and joy in movement,” he explains. “Working from a place that isn’t stress or fear.”
For Sasha, the challenge was returning to full-time dance after spending much of their recent working life in early childhood education.
“Getting back into my body every hour of every day was daunting,” Sasha admits. “I got through the first week and I was really sore, but I bounced back.”
What made that return possible was the trust shared by the four-person cast; Sasha and Caleb alongside Airu Matsuda and Millie Maden.
“Day one was just like, ‘Oh, hi friends,’” Caleb says. “I feel so safe and so held, and whatever I bring forth will be respected.”
That reciprocal trust runs through Big Low Dream: between choreographer and performers, between bodies and objects, and between the work and an audience invited to find their own meaning within it.
The result is sure to be evocative and funny, intimate and sweeping. A ‘rehearsal of possible futures’ created by artists reaching through the dark together.
Big Low Dream is on at The Hannah 10—12 September. Grab your tickets here.