Compelled by what is most urgent for these makers, this space is for curiosity, searching and pushing forward to reveal tomorrow’s bodies and tomorrow's ideas, interjecting into today.

Featuring new and reimagined works from Lily-Mae Solhee Baird, Wiseman Mataiti and Janina Smolira, that speak to being the body / beyond the body, queerness, indigeneity and who is going to give them their 10s. Contemporary dance meets musings on Buchaechum (Korean fan dance), the energy of Taekwondo clashes with carnivorous flowers, and Ballroom is in full bloom with an excerpt of 404: Fafa Not Found, a highlight of Auckland Pride.

(How) Does This Make You Feel?

Be with me in a reclamation of body, presence and power, asking what it is to feel, channel, experience - exploring the meaning of incarnation. Ultimately investigating presence; honoring the embodiment of feeling and what is beyond us. A landscape of dance refusing coherence, made in transit; in my notes app, among teabags and toast crumbs, on the displaced feet that carry me, in buses traversing stolen Whenua. With hands wavering in instability, doubt, rage. Here we go - too not run away. To feel something, incarnated.

Carnivorous Flowers

Carnivorous Flowers is a contemporary dance work in development, exploring the fragility of affection. The carnivorous flower, a delicate but off-putting plant, blends petals with flesh and, through its slimy consumption of insects, disturbs the Western cultural connotations of flowers as feminine, delicate, and harmonious. Navigating the sometimes prickly border between tenderness and hostility, Carnivorous Flowers explores the complexities of relationships between women. Surreal ecological imagery disrupts Western notions of femininity and power. Tenuous and sticky attachments keep the insect and flower together, but attention can become digestion on a hair trigger.

Additionally inspired by the literary work of Olga Tokarczuk, embodiments of nature in Slavic folklore, and the figure of Baba Yaga, Carnivorous Flowers is a development of Smolira's choreographic fascination with the strangeness of the natural world. Smolira is curious about how the queer, the grotesque and the surreal might disrupt restrictive Western notions of femininity, and become metaphors to sensitively explore gendered relationships to power.

404: Fafa Not Found (excerpt)

404 is a system error. A message that appears when something cannot be located. I began with this digital language as a metaphor for bodies that move through structures that attempt to name, archive and define them. What does it mean to exist inside systems that were never built for you, and what happens when you cannot be neatly found?

This remounted work brings together an emerging cast of artists. I draw from my lived experience within the Aotearoa and Oceania Ballroom scene, where Ballroom exist as both artistic form and survival practice. The work asks: who is giving my 10s, and who benefits from the spectacle of the body? Forged from Black and Latinx queer communities, Ballroom has always been a space where chosen family, Houses and lineage become acts of resistance against exclusion and surveillance. Rooted within these genealogies, the performers carry their own House affiliations: Wiseman (Wise IMAN) of the House of IMAN, Komai (Kairon Coven-Aucoin) of the House of Coven-Aucoin, and Juelz (Juelz Givenchy) of the House of Givenchy.

As a Pasifika artist, I remain conscious of how our bodies have historically been viewed and interpreted. Bodies identifying as akava'ine, vakasalewalewa and fa'afafine exist in this digital altar, refusing disappearance while resisting easy legibility. Silence becomes compositional resistance. Ritual becomes a method of remembering. 404 leans into presence: the body not as content, not as product, but as a lived archive.

404: not found, but still 10s across the board.