Bringing together Caleb Heke, Madi Tumataroa, Nancy Wijohn, Kelly Nash and Moana Ete, the work sits between dance, song, somatic practice and live performance. Building from the acclaimed world of Mythosoma, co-commissioned by Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts and YIRRAMBOI, this pared-back iteration moves deeper into the work’s inner world.

Created through SomaTactics, Body Island’s choreographic practice of touch, pressure and relational response, The Room Would Split Open asks how care can become a physical system: attention, pressure, refusal, support and response. The work gathers around the body as an archive: a living field of memory, protection and change. Beneath the surface of each body are histories, shocks and connections that have never fully disappeared — the ache of knowing but not having, the intelligence of survival, and the pressure of being changed by another.

Emerging from Body Island’s wider practice at the intersection of contemporary dance, somatic bodywork, Māori cosmology and live performance, the work draws on decades of Aotearoa dance practice, international touring, ConTact C.A.R.E bodywork and kaupapa-led performance. For Body Island, the stage is not separate from the clinic, the body, the archive or the ritual: it is a place where movement becomes a way of thinking, remembering and relating.