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!