In case you’re expecting butterflies in Oli Mathiesen’s contemporary dance work, let us disavow you of that notion.
Okay, the show, part of Melt Festival at Brisbane Powerhouse, is called The Butterfly Who Flew into The Rave. It’s on later this week (October 23-24) and promises to be an uncompromising 60 minutes of high-octane action featuring Oli Mathiesen (the show’s creator), Lucy Lynch and Sharvon Mortimer.
Great name for a show, but here’s the thing – it has nothing to do with butterflies.
“The title is just based on something I misheard,” Mathiesen says when I chat to him prior to his arrival in Brisbane from Auckland, where he lives.
“I was listening to the radio one day and they were talking about this kids’ book which sounded like the title was The Butterfly Who Flew into The Rave. I googled it but found it was actually called The Butterfly Who Flew in the Rain.”
He preferred the misheard version, although he confesses to not actually being a butterfly fan at all.
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“There won’t be any butterflies in this show,” he confirms.
What there will be is 60 minutes or so of frenetic contemporary dance set to the booming, relentless techno album Nocturbulous Behaviour by Detroit techno pioneer Suburban Knight (part of the Underground Resistance collective).
Exploring the movement vocabulary used in techno and rave culture, a contemporary nightclub between three bodies emerges. Relentless movement, seamless without pause, detailed down to every beat.
It’s the atmosphere and culture of a three-day rave condensed into a high art, streamlined performance where you watch the destruction of three human beings commence in front of you. Indulge in the pain, the sweat, the cathartic mess. It’s a display of pure endurance to achieve a goal.
“A spectacle of the human body as a victim to music, as a victim to passion, as a victim to our endless desire to achieve more. To win and win again,” says show’s promotional blurb.
Mathiesen has always been interested in rave culture and Suburban Knight’s music meant he had a musical soundtrack for a show based on that interest.
“I listened to it for a few years, banking ideas, and every single beat of the music is considered in what we do on stage,” Mathiesen says. “And we don’t stop.”
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Mathiesen is a queer indigenous choreographer and dancer based in Auckland ( Tāmaki Makaurau). He is an emerging artist, working nationally and internationally since graduating from Unitec in 2020 with a Bachelor’s in Performing and Screen Arts – Contemporary Dance.
Mathiesen has worked and toured with Aotearoa companies including The New Zealand Dance Company, Atamira Dance Company and Black Grace, as well as performing Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s 10 Duets on a Theme of Rescue (2023).
He has choreographed works for Atamira Dance Company, Black Grace, Tempo Dance Festival and The Performance Arcade. His award-winning The Butterfly Who Flew into The Rave has played the Auckland Pride Festival, New Zealand Fringe Festival and now Brisbane’s Melt Festival.
Mathiesen acknowledges that Brisbane Powerhouse is the perfect venue for the show and is the sort of place a rave could and should be held.
The Butterfly Who Flew into The Rave has also been performed in unusual venues including a library and an underground car park. The show’s appeal is wider than expected, he says.
“It’s intergenerational. We didn’t know who the target audience was originally. We assumed it was juts our peers, but it has really expanded.”
Mathiesen will be taking the show to Detroit next year to perform with Suburban Knight in the place where the techno soundtrack was born but, in the meantime, he is looking forward to the Brisbane outing of a show that condenses the marathon energy, euphoria, exhaustion and communal ritual of a three-day rave into a single continuous performance.
Expect a blend of street dance, frantic footwork, body ripples, disco arms and club-inspired movement vocabularies (such as waacking and voguing) performed under dramatic strobe and neon lighting.
“It’s full on, nonstop and very relentless,” adds Mathiesen. And not a butterfly in sight.
The Butterfly Who Flew into the Rave, Brisbane Powerhouse, October 23-24.
brisbanepowerhouse.org/events/the-butterfly-who-flew-into-the-rave
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