Dream a Little Bigger with This Year’s World of Wearable Arts

United States designer Grace DuVal (and seven time WOW finalist) has taken the Supreme WOW Award this year with her piece Curves Ahead. Built of bright orange road netting, road signs and bedecked with a mohawk of traffic cones, this piece is a blazing bright beacon amongst the rolling sea that is Dream Awake – this year’s World of Wearable Arts show.

I’ve had the privilege to attend WOW a few times now, and every year it is astounding. Hundreds of Aotearoa’s finest creatives come together to build a 90-minute show that, without fail, becomes a wonderful spectacle on Pōneke’s arts landscape. This year is no exception.

Welcomed into the TSB Arena last night, we’re given holographic bird masks and bits of paper that tell us to write down our dream. These are collected by “Dreamcatchers” – artists wearing brown gauze uniforms, carrying large butterfly nets – and are deposited into a suitcase lying in the middle of the stage.

The possibilities of just what we can dream builds the basis of the show, as The Dreamer (Sharn Te Pou) sings, dancers and rollerskates his way through six exotic locales (the six categories of this year’s WOW competition); dressed in a beautiful sky-blue suit.

The first dream is the Natural World. Models weave amongst long strands of fabric hanging from the ceiling; all their costume designs inspired by the variety of the natural world. Marina Polakoff’s Weeping Willow is a an intricately woven web of leather and felt – representing a burnt weeping willow crying over its plight; Siang-Ying Lu’s Anxiety Rafflesia a person-sized rafflesia plant whose model pops their head in and out of eliciting much mirth from the crowd; and Ashish Dhaka’s Soundscape, a collection of EVA and muslin that undulates while they walk.

Our Dreamer clambers out of the floor and into their next dream – Geometric Abstraction. This dream begins in all black and white; with morphsuit-clad dancers collecting and shifting around our Dreamer. Inspired by shapes and patterns, this dream has some incredible distinct work – a rhino, made out of kaleidoscope black and white (Natufa); three performers, including one in a wheelchair, with rotating pastel symbols on their backs (Changing Perceptions), and three animated clothes on their hangers (Walkin’ Wardrobe).

I adore the Aotearoa category every year at WOW, for how the show’s incredible creators meld Aotearoa of the past with a bountiful and futuristic Aotearoa to come. This year, our Dreamer builds his dream using the power of Aotearoa’s music; a Te Reo cover of Royals by Lorde and Slice of Heaven by Dave Dobbyn being some of the highlights. A giant red triangle descends from the ceiling, swallowing our singers, as the models parade around on the fringes of the stage. By and large my favourite of this category was Bee Van Pallandt’s Woolly Wired, a celebration of NZ farm life, with a model wearing stubbies and a black tee, pulling three sheep onto the stage with him.

The Open Dream (Category) is one with no bounds. Our Dreamer is on rollerskates for this and the following section, whizzing around the stage, unbelievably impressively. He encounters The Dream Maker (Nikita 雅涵 Tu-Bryant) who sings with him, and the pair play a cat-and-mouse game across the rest of the show; one of flirtation, perhaps, or of antagonism (or both!). In this category, designs have no boundries. Our runner-up for the Supreme Award this year is part of this category – Xuanchang Liu & Jingyi Lin’s ode to love, He Art – which is bright pink embroidery over a heart-inspired base.

Avant-Garde allows for boundary pushing and new kinds of design. In this dream, our ensemble dances from on top of light up boxes, as the models walk the stage around them. This category features our Supreme Award winner of the year, as well as a design made of 15,000 puzzle pieces (Pieces of Us), one of plastic shopping bags (Sgàthach the Singed), and one of recycled Kimonos (Kamimono). It’s this category that really shows off the true heart of WOW – utterly bizarre and wonderous design mediums and choices.

Our final collection – and final dream – of the night is Crazy Curiosities of the Creature Carnival. This is a spectacular number, featuring the entirety of the show’s company in a dizzying trip through a spooky carnival that they invite us to join. We put on our holographic masks and enjoy.

This category is full of creations out of time and has a distinct spice that’s been absent from the show thus far, with undulating dance moments and direct pieces to the audience. Our incredible aerialists (Anne-Marie Godin & Rodney Bell) throughout the entire night return for a fantastic wheelchair aerial act that seems to defy physics. Bizarre, bold and a little grotesque, CCOTCC contains my favourite design of the night, Carolyn Gibson & Joelle March’s Chronos – a work of canvas and steel, wearing a steampunk mask and carrying a time machine.

The thing about WOW is that it is constantly spectacular. It is truly an event like no other, and the scale and breadth of what lies within is something that will take your breath away. All this comes down to the fabulous hard-working people behind it.

From the show director to the production interns, an event this big can only happen due to a lot of hard work behind the scenes. I’d also like to make a special mention to the tech teams behind this show – I was seated very close to the tech booth this year, and as a projectionist and technician myself, the amount of work that must go into running a show this large is almost nauseating.

Many congratulations to the WOW team for a fabulous night!