On Tahunanui Beach later this month, Nelsonians en masse, are invited to enter the twilight zone. To become part of a salt-air spectacle as the sun goes down on a Nelson Arts Festival performance.
Words: Britt Coker
Choreographer Chloe Loftus, who lives a stone’s throw from the beach, has been carrying the idea for years. What she envisages is not just a gathering on the seashore, but a combination of the incoming tide, the sand dunes, and the audience and performers meeting somewhere in the middle.
Chloe is pitching a vision that she calls, collective effervescence. She recently completed a Creative New Zealand Fellowship exploring it in her work. “This is a state of awe that happens when we move together, when we have this shared purpose, and it resets our neurophysiology. It synchronises and it creates a sense of euphoria and belonging, and also civic engagement.” In a world of screens, remote work and relentless individualism, she is interested in what happens when people physically gather again. “There's such a sense of disconnect and this moment of coming together to have this shared, very accessible, open experience of reconnecting to each other and to the land is what brings us our power.”
The Gathering Tide is planned for Sunday 26 October. Chloe is aiming for at least 100 people to take part, although she is always hoping for more. And if the words “dance performance” make you instinctively want to step backwards, Chloe wants to offer some perspective before you melt into the crowd. “Think of it as movement, as opposed to dance. It's very beginners friendly.” Successful mass movements, she explains, rely on simplicity. Participants do not need a ballet background, a decent high kick or a leotard with matching leg warmers. Just willingness and a dose of carpe diem. “If there's a little moment of curiosity, and then you notice yourself holding back, it's like, you know what, seize it and just be a part of this extraordinary event.”
The name is literal, of course. “Obviously, the timing of it will be as the tide gathers, but it also is a bit of a metaphor for this sense of unstoppable momentum, and whether that's a feeling or social change, and the sense that working together like this in community, reconnecting with nature, that's the antidote to perhaps a feeling of despair and disconnection that feels quite prevalent in the world right now.”
There is a bit of drama in the timing. Chloe and her collaborators had to work carefully to find the right date. A small window when the tide is coming in, there is still enough beach left for audience and performers, and the sun is slipping down behind the mountains. “What I love about creating an event immersed in the environment like this is that the environment not only becomes a stage, but a kind of active co-creator,” she says. In other words, the water is not just a pretty backdrop. It gives literality to the word immersive in ‘immersive experience’ because yes, you are welcome to walk into the sea at the end (if you want to). After the beach performance, and the optional dip, there will be a fire on the beach to warm yourselves around, and sounds from DJ Alvaro as he plays the sun to bed.
While Chloe is a Nelsonian, her life started far from here and even now her creative vision keeps her often on the road. Born in Italy to British parents, she moved to New Zealand when she was eight, grew up near Wellington, trained in the UK and returned to Aotearoa in 2016. “It's always felt like home,” she says. Her sister stayed settled here, and every return feels pretty good.
She has now been working as a professional dancer and choreographer for 21 years, starting where most begin, the windowless box of a traditional theatre - but her creativity felt constrained by its setup and even the audience it reaches. “I became just quite disillusioned with theatre spaces, especially with contemporary dance, that it can be quite alienating, and there's a sort of cultural and social barrier to accessing it,”. So she began moving the work outward. First into cafes, bars and foyers and eventually into the outdoors, where passersby could stumble into a performance without needing to buy a ticket or know when it will end.
That shift changed everything. “It would engage people who would otherwise never think to come and see contemporary dance, and it breaks down barriers.” For Chloe, creativity and culture are part of what “inspires us and makes us so deeply human and connects us”.
Her work has taken her all over the world. In Cardiff, she was one of a team of mass movement directors for City of the Unexpected, a huge Roald Dahl centenary celebration that sent performers across the city centre with no neat schedule for audiences to follow. People roamed the streets and encountered tightrope walkers, a five-metre giant peach with hundreds processing behind it, car park umbrella performances, pillow fights, synchronised swimmers and umbrella dancers. “There were 350,000 audience attendees,” Chloe says. “At one point, we just had to stop the event to kind of dilute the audience down a bit.”
“There was one YouTube clip of a big projection onto the city hall as a big finale for the whole weekend, and It was like the most Roald Dahl thing. You could hear this little boy saying, “Oh wow, this is the best day of my life.”
For all the incredible best-day-of-my-life qualifiers, it’s the individuals, post-performance, that Chloe finds most memorable. People come up afterwards and talk. They share memories, grief, surprise, tears, hugs. “It's what makes it extraordinary for me. It’s the thousands of people over the years who have shared really personal moments,” she says. “I feel very grateful to be able to do what I do for those moments of connection.”
Chloe spends much of the year in Nelson when she is not touring, and admits that a lot of an artist’s life is less visionary and more paperwork. Funding applications, bookings, logistics, all the administrative means to the creative ends. But when out walking, she listens to music and lets the ideas arrive. Often, those walks are on the very beach where this month’s project will unfold.
This is not Chloe’s first foray into collective movement in Nelson. Back in 2020, a group of willing locals became ‘Us’, a performance that wound its way through CBD streets, shops and art galleries, a single silent line doing simple choreographed hand movements that ended with each participant peeling off into the crowd until there was no performers left to applaud.
Interspersed between the sleepless nights is a quiet confidence that Nelson will show up. Yes, anonymity is rare. Yes, people may wait to see who else is doing it first. But Chloe has seen local enthusiasm before, and she believes “Whakatū has a really big heart”. She knows the beach is already home to an enthusiastic community of dawn dippers, morning yogis and dog walkers. Add in Nelson’s creative community and anyone with a bit of daring, and she trusts The Gathering Tide will gather the numbers too.
“There's something really beautiful about creating site-specifically like this, because it forever changes your relationship to that place, and to be a part of something where you're immersed in community, you're having a shared purpose, you're putting yourself out there maybe in a slightly vulnerable way, but in a really safe and welcoming environment. There's that sense of euphoria and achievement, and to have that in your memory bank every time you're visiting that beach again will be really special.”
There are two October workshops for those keen to participate. Open to all, 16 years and over. To register, go to nelsonartsfestival.nz
Tahunanui Beach - Mon 26 Oct, 7pm (60 min). Rain date, Sat 31 Oct. Beach DJ until 10pm. Free.
