PHOEBE ROBERTSON
Authors note on positionality: I come to this review from a background in poetry and theatre, not music. I acknowledge that my reading of these works is shaped by that positionality—what I notice, what alienates me, what moves me. My response is one of partiality, and hopefully care.
When I think of music and language I think of connection—not just in sentiment, but in shared rhythm, breath, and timing. Love Letterz: A Poetry-Inspired Variety Show promised this kind of communion—a bold, cabaret-style evening where poetry meets music, dance, and song. In practice, the show both honoured and complicated that promise. Across four distinct segments, connection was offered, withheld, delayed, and finally delivered—not through seamless harmony, but through friction, rupture, and eventual release.
Curated by poet-composer Cadence Chung and presented as part of Kia Mau Festival’s He Toi Hou programme, Love Letterz assembled a collection of young artists working across disciplines. What bound their works together was not genre or tone, but a shared attention to the act of reaching out—toward an audience, a feeling, or another performer. And yet, the show began by holding us at arm’s length.
Estella Wallace’s Journeys opened the night in near silence: no introduction, no acknowledgement of the audience, just sound building steadily in a sparce, dark room. Ethan Rawhiti-Hotter (piano) and Estella Wallace (clarinet) played in dissonant tandem—at times clashing, at times in conversation, and at times eerily mirroring each other. The lighting (cool whites, blues, and purples) reinforced the emotional distance. For those unfamiliar with contemporary classical forms, the effect was both striking and alienating. Moments of warmth—a glance between musicians, a shared smile—flashed briefly but didn’t linger. It was as if we were watching connection play out behind glass.
Joshua Toumu’a’s Six Poems shifted us toward language, but not yet toward intimacy. Delivered as a series of spoken poems accompanied by projections and music, the piece offered more to hold onto—a structure, a narrative arc, fragments of personal and emotional terrain. Still, much of the connection remained internalised, poetic in the literary sense rather than the performative one. A highlight, Winter Conquest, evoked longing through restraint, metaphor, and implication. Throughout, the combination of projected visuals washing over Toumu’a’s body and his steady reading from the page created a gentle opacity—as if we were engaging through a scrim, always one step removed. That sense of distance crystallised in the final moments: the thing about dropping pages during a performance is that, eventually, you have to pick them up. When Toumu’a did so—stage lights still up, audience in darkness—it created a moment of quiet awkwardness, exposing the mechanics beneath the performance. That pause subtly echoed some of the show’s more hesitant transitions, moments where the seams of the evening briefly showed.
It was Weichu Huang’s Scenes from a Night at the Opera that cracked open the night’s reserve—a dance response to Cadence Chung’s poem cycle of the same name, created in collaboration with sound designer Kassandra Wang. This was where connection became not just thematic, but embodied. A dancer moved in tandem with spoken word, and suddenly the space between bodies mattered: the interplay of proximity, gesture, interruption. The most impactful moment of the whole show came when Huang paused, stepped forward, and took the mic. ‘Forgive me for interrupting,’ they said—and then continued the poem live. It was a rupture, a risk, a reassertion of the body as a vessel for language.
This moment of interruption broke the structure and tone in a way that felt thrilling—it cracked the form open and created a direct, unmediated connection with the audience. I loved the shift into bar music and the more modern soundscapes that followed, but the interruption itself felt underdeveloped. There was so much potential in that break—so much tension and intimacy—and I wished the piece had followed through more fully on that risk.
By the time we reached Cadence Chung’s Love Letterz, the atmosphere had thawed. This was the only piece with clear scenic design: a leather chair, a side table with liquor bottles and glasses. The performance was funny, generous, and musically sharp—setting Jackson McCarthy’s poetry to original compositions about love ‘like a donut’ and the original green V. If earlier works toyed with distance, Chung’s embraced presence. We laughed with her, we were finally allowed to connect without earning it through discomfort first.
What emerged over the course of the evening was not a uniform exploration of love or poetry, but a study in proximity—how close a performance is willing to let you get. Some pieces resisted contact, insisting on opacity or abstraction. Others gradually drew us in, through voice, through movement, through humour. If the night’s arc had a weakness, it was in the lack of clarity around that progression. The movement from distance to connection was palpable, but unspoken. I was left wondering what it meant to begin so far from the audience, and what kind of conversation the works were having with each other beyond sequence.
There were clear through lines in subject matter, but I found myself craving a stronger arc in how those connections unfolded—a sense of dialogue not just in theme, but in form, tone, or approach. What would it have meant for the night to more deliberately chart a path from guardedness to intimacy, from abstraction to embodiment? The ingredients were there, but the conversation between pieces felt more adjacent than cumulative.
Still, Love Letterz made space for risk, surprise, and emotional whiplash. It was at times cerebral, at times deeply felt, alienating, then intimate. Its greatest strength lay not in a seamless blend of genres, but in the friction between them. If connection was the show’s central idea, then Love Letterz asked what it takes to earn it—when it’s withheld, when it’s offered freely, and when it arrives not with a flourish, but with a ‘forgive me for interrupting.’
When I think of music and language I think of connection—not just in sentiment, but in shared rhythm, breath, and timing. Love Letterz: A Poetry-Inspired Variety Show promised this kind of communion—a bold, cabaret-style evening where poetry meets music, dance, and song. In practice, the show both honoured and complicated that promise. Across four distinct segments, connection was offered, withheld, delayed, and finally delivered—not through seamless harmony, but through friction, rupture, and eventual release.
Curated by poet-composer Cadence Chung and presented as part of Kia Mau Festival’s He Toi Hou programme, Love Letterz assembled a collection of young artists working across disciplines. What bound their works together was not genre or tone, but a shared attention to the act of reaching out—toward an audience, a feeling, or another performer. And yet, the show began by holding us at arm’s length.
Estella Wallace’s Journeys opened the night in near silence: no introduction, no acknowledgement of the audience, just sound building steadily in a sparce, dark room. Ethan Rawhiti-Hotter (piano) and Estella Wallace (clarinet) played in dissonant tandem—at times clashing, at times in conversation, and at times eerily mirroring each other. The lighting (cool whites, blues, and purples) reinforced the emotional distance. For those unfamiliar with contemporary classical forms, the effect was both striking and alienating. Moments of warmth—a glance between musicians, a shared smile—flashed briefly but didn’t linger. It was as if we were watching connection play out behind glass.
Joshua Toumu’a’s Six Poems shifted us toward language, but not yet toward intimacy. Delivered as a series of spoken poems accompanied by projections and music, the piece offered more to hold onto—a structure, a narrative arc, fragments of personal and emotional terrain. Still, much of the connection remained internalised, poetic in the literary sense rather than the performative one. A highlight, Winter Conquest, evoked longing through restraint, metaphor, and implication. Throughout, the combination of projected visuals washing over Toumu’a’s body and his steady reading from the page created a gentle opacity—as if we were engaging through a scrim, always one step removed. That sense of distance crystallised in the final moments: the thing about dropping pages during a performance is that, eventually, you have to pick them up. When Toumu’a did so—stage lights still up, audience in darkness—it created a moment of quiet awkwardness, exposing the mechanics beneath the performance. That pause subtly echoed some of the show’s more hesitant transitions, moments where the seams of the evening briefly showed.
It was Weichu Huang’s Scenes from a Night at the Opera that cracked open the night’s reserve—a dance response to Cadence Chung’s poem cycle of the same name, created in collaboration with sound designer Kassandra Wang. This was where connection became not just thematic, but embodied. A dancer moved in tandem with spoken word, and suddenly the space between bodies mattered: the interplay of proximity, gesture, interruption. The most impactful moment of the whole show came when Huang paused, stepped forward, and took the mic. ‘Forgive me for interrupting,’ they said—and then continued the poem live. It was a rupture, a risk, a reassertion of the body as a vessel for language.
This moment of interruption broke the structure and tone in a way that felt thrilling—it cracked the form open and created a direct, unmediated connection with the audience. I loved the shift into bar music and the more modern soundscapes that followed, but the interruption itself felt underdeveloped. There was so much potential in that break—so much tension and intimacy—and I wished the piece had followed through more fully on that risk.
By the time we reached Cadence Chung’s Love Letterz, the atmosphere had thawed. This was the only piece with clear scenic design: a leather chair, a side table with liquor bottles and glasses. The performance was funny, generous, and musically sharp—setting Jackson McCarthy’s poetry to original compositions about love ‘like a donut’ and the original green V. If earlier works toyed with distance, Chung’s embraced presence. We laughed with her, we were finally allowed to connect without earning it through discomfort first.
What emerged over the course of the evening was not a uniform exploration of love or poetry, but a study in proximity—how close a performance is willing to let you get. Some pieces resisted contact, insisting on opacity or abstraction. Others gradually drew us in, through voice, through movement, through humour. If the night’s arc had a weakness, it was in the lack of clarity around that progression. The movement from distance to connection was palpable, but unspoken. I was left wondering what it meant to begin so far from the audience, and what kind of conversation the works were having with each other beyond sequence.
There were clear through lines in subject matter, but I found myself craving a stronger arc in how those connections unfolded—a sense of dialogue not just in theme, but in form, tone, or approach. What would it have meant for the night to more deliberately chart a path from guardedness to intimacy, from abstraction to embodiment? The ingredients were there, but the conversation between pieces felt more adjacent than cumulative.
Still, Love Letterz made space for risk, surprise, and emotional whiplash. It was at times cerebral, at times deeply felt, alienating, then intimate. Its greatest strength lay not in a seamless blend of genres, but in the friction between them. If connection was the show’s central idea, then Love Letterz asked what it takes to earn it—when it’s withheld, when it’s offered freely, and when it arrives not with a flourish, but with a ‘forgive me for interrupting.’
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