AAF: Blood Water Earth Performance

The New Zealand premiere of an exhibition and performance series by artists Louise Potiki Bryant and Santee Smith.

Choreographed and performed by Santee Smith.

Blood Water Earth is a ritual, an embodied incantation, traversing sacred alignments from cosmos to womb to whenua. Weaving performance, video, and music, it channels the ancestral, elemental, and the dream, awakening pre-colonial knowledges.

Acknowledging inter-connectedness and shared experiences of Indigenous woman, Blood Water Earth places Konkwehon:we/Mana Wahine worldview in the vanguard.

This will be the premiere performance of Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s Blood Water Earth in Aotearoa and Santee Smith’s first time performing in Tāmaki Makaurau.

Exhibition
Blood Water Earth is an immersive video installation and ceramic display arising out of an international Indigenous collaboration between Kahnyen’kehàka artist Santee Smith (Artistic Director of Kaha:wi Dance Theatre) and Ngāi Tahu video/dance artist Louise Potiki Bryant.

Blood Water Earth re-contextualises video designed for a series of dance productions by Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, which focus on the reawakening of the sacred feminine and incorporate imagery from both Aotearoa and Six Nations of the Grand River, Ontario, Canada.

Blood Water Earth activates sacred alignments from cosmos to womb, its symbolic ritual renewal, and a conscious stripping away of colonial impacts on Indigenous women.

Presented by: Auckland Arts Festival and Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery.
Supported by: Creative New Zealand, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council.