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!