Artists take inspiration from anywhere, and create beauty, emotion and provocation. For Samoan-born choreographer Lemi Ponifasio’s Birds with Skymirrors, inspiration came in the form of frigate birds. ‘I encountered birds carrying strips of video tapes in their mouths, dangling like liquid mirrors in the sky,’ said Ponifasio. ‘It was both a vision of beauty and the spirit of death.’
The seven birds, which he saw while working on the tiny Pacific island of Tarawa, struck something deep within. ‘I thought about the polluted ocean and poison river that we leave for our children,’ he said. ‘Dying rivers and dying species is our dying humanity. It is our connectedness rotting away.’
