Director Malia Johnston's latest work Belle - A Performance of Air was inspired by meeting aerial choreographer, Jenny Ritchie.
Johnston is a renowned director and creative, she directed the opening ceremony for the Fifa Women's World Cup 2023 and has been the show director for the World of Wearable Art since 2002.
Her latest work Belle - A Performance of Air is a mesmerising melding of lights, aerial performance and theatre at the Auckland Arts Festival this month.
She and Ritchie were interested in finding a way aerialists and dancers could meet and work together on an equal footing, she told RNZ's Saturday Morning.
"I've worked with an artist called Jenny Ritchie, who had returned back home from time in Switzerland, and she'd been working with Rigolo Circus.
"And I met her on WOW years ago, and her trajectory as an artist when she came home, she was interested in that contemporary space of circus, and I was interested in the contemporary space with dance.
"And we wanted to get together and see whether we could find a language, where the dancers and the aerialists could be together," she said.
Belle - A Performance of Air is designed by Rowan Pierce, she said.
"He's transforming the air with light, creating architecture that the performers move through above and beyond.
"He uses smoke to fill the space with something that the light can hit, but it basically creates a kind of a cosmic space. He plays with portals, doorways, floors and ceilings that sort of shape shift, and the performers disappear behind them."
Despite 20 years in the business, she still gets nervous before a big show, she said.
"It feels horrible, the sickness of…it's basically hoping that what you've done is enough for the people that are going to come and see what you've done. And I think if that goes, then it's time to retire.
"You need to keep feeling the fear. But I'm more comfortable with that feeling than perhaps I used to be, or it's familiar. I'm like, 'Hello, uncomfortable feeling'."
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