She acknowledges that yes, the temporary job is a bit Flashdance – a reference to the movie where an aspiring dancer works in a steel mill. Just a couple of hours before we met, Hannah was on a building site where she demolishes offices, sands floors, paints, fixes gib board to walls and wields tools like drills, saws and sledgehammers. “It’s a bit of a cliché but it is about taking some of that power back and going, ‘if I choose to be a sexual, erotic being then I choose to be that in that moment, but I can also choose not to be’.” “I feel passionately about things like our autonomy and agency I want to help strip away all these ideas that we have around the body or sexuality being shameful and the ways in which the feminine body has been manipulated and abused and oppressed since the dawn of time,” she says. Hannah views her body as a tool to use however she chooses one that can subvert stereotypes to ask questions – but never provide easy answers – about beliefs and beauty myths which trap us all in a never-ending quest where we constantly labour under the weight of social expectations. She’s earned a reputation for no-holds barred, avant-garde and highly physical shows where she regularly dances naked or in nothing but skilfully applied body paint. The body admired the body reviled: it’s a juxtaposition central to Hannah’s lengthy career as a dancer, choreographer, actor, SPFX body performer, stuntwoman, burlesque artist, model, tutor, muse and director of her own company, projectMUSE. “I was a stick! I went home and told Mum it was so fucking dangerous.” Hannah was advised to increase the number of classes she took because she was “getting a bit podgy” rather than feeling she needed to act on the advice, Hannah was outraged. In a dance class – not, she stresses, at her regular school – an instructor pinched bottoms and tummies while commenting on dancers’ weights. It wasn’t just me out there as a human…”Īround the same time, Hannah, now 34, encountered another situation which could have pushed her down the darker road of body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
“There are many things that have contributed to my ideas around the body but that was one of the biggest because by having all of these people stop and say, ‘oh my god, that looks amazing,’ it helped me to realise that the body could be so many things. She recalls experiencing a little “ping” of nervousness about playing a living statue at an outdoor festival but also admits to being “a bit of a show-off” so she was enthusiastic about her transformation into a walking piece of art. Hannah Tasker-Poland was just 16 when she appeared in public wearing nothing but body paint and nipple covers rather than an act of youthful rebellion, it was a formative moment in the brilliant career of one of Aotearoa’s most enthralling dance artists. For a mesmerising show, the body might be the best canvas.
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