Tuesday 22 November 2011, 5.15pm for a 5.45pm start

Rona Bailey Room, Te Whaea: National Dance & Drama Centre, 11 Hutchison Road, Newtown, Wellington

Entry by koha. Drinks and nibbles will be served.

Marianne Schultz, a PhD candidate and tutor in the History Department, University of Auckland, will talk about Rona Bailey as a member of the New Dance Group. The New Dance Group played a key role in pioneering modern dance in New Zealand in the 1940s.

Crows Feet Dance Collective is an all-women contemporary dance group based in Wellington, New Zealand. Beyond those bare facts, we are a bundle of paradoxes.

• Members are 35 to 67 years old.
• Some are super dancers and some … well, not so experienced.
• We include 6 dancing grandmothers.
• Most of us have full-time jobs — yet we perform a new work in public at least once a year.

Jan Bolwell's choreography makes the most of our talents, and we have many admirers.

Crows Feet Dance Collective turned its attention to the culinary arts in a comic dance work, How to be a Domestic Goddess. The show was performed at the 2010 Wellington Fringe Festival, and won the Fringe Award for Best Dance Show.

 Going for Baroque performed to Handel's Water Music. Living on the edge of Wellington's beautiful harbour, the Crows have taken images from their immediate surroundings and transformed them into a series of dances. You may catch the odd glimpse of a traditional dance step, but mostly it is a witty, irreverant interpretation of Handel's famous score by sprightly dancers of a certain age. In the hands of guest percussionist Andreas Lepper, water coolers and running taps are also given a starring role.