Premiere of The Keeper’s Dance

THE KEEPER'S DANCE 

Collaborative work by Rosemary Candelario and Miki Seifert 

Soundtrack by William Franco 

What does it mean to be oriented to these islands rather than elsewhere? What happens at the meeting of land and sea, warning and safety, permanence and transition? 

During the week preceding this performance, we made pilgrimages to five lighthouses around Wellington: the lighthouse on Matiu  Island, Castlepoint Lighthouse, Baring Head Lighthouse, Cape Palliser Lighthouse, and Point Halswell Lighthouse. At each site, we experienced the place—its wind, its isolation, its particular quality of light, the rhythm of waves against rock, the histories held in stone and signal. 

From these encounters, we wrote butoh-fu, the language of butoh choreography. Butoh-fu are not conventional dance notations but evocative texts that guide transformation: become the weight of waiting, your spine is the lighthouse keeper's endless vigil, dissolve into the threshold where land warns sea. 

The Keeper's Dance explores themes of stewardship, orientation, and the connections between land and water. The lighthouse is both warning and guide, marking the edge where everything changes. The body, too, can be a keeper—of memory, of place, of the transitions we witness and embody. 

The lighthouses we visited are sites of profound isolation and profound connection. They mark danger and offer safety. They are built by human hands but exist in conversation with forces far larger than ourselves. This work asks: what do our bodies learn when we allow them to be transformed by such places?