DARK!DARK!DARK!

Two dancers, one entity

CONJAH is the working name of a partnership between two dancers who are also partners in life. Jahra (Arieta) Wasasala is Fijian and Pākehā, raised in Tāmaki Makaurau and connected within Viti to the provinces of Macuata and Ba; their practice is described as world-building as much as choreography, drawing on embodied and disembodied phenomena and on what the duo call Tagata Moana future-mythos. ooshcon is Sāmoan and Pākehā, from the villages of Lalomanu and Veilele, raised in Te Awa Kairangi ki Uta, and came up through street dance battling before moving into street-dance theatre. The movement vocabularies are genuinely mixed: krumping, FlexN, Japanese Butoh and Fijian meke all sit among Wasasala's listed sources.

Both had touring records before CONJAH existed. Wasasala's solo and company work has been performed in Aotearoa, Australia, Hawai'i, New York, Germany, Fiji, Guahån and Canada. ooshcon has toured dance works in Aotearoa, Australia, Tahiti, Fiji, Mexico, Las Vegas, San Diego, China and Taiwan. CONJAH itself is set up to do three things rather than one — make solo and ensemble works, run workshops for a wide spectrum of communities, and produce dance festivals. Its own archive lists HYPAMASS and THE NEST, a street-dance solo festival, among earlier projects.

The recognition came before the big work. Wasasala took the Prime Minister's Pacific Youth Award in the Creative New Zealand Arts and Creativity category in 2016, and in 2022 the pair jointly won the Arts Foundation's Tumu Toi Springboard Award. In 2024 Wasasala was included in Auckland Art Gallery's triennial Aotearoa Contemporary exhibition.

He Toi Puaki and the Wellington premiere

DARK!DARK!DARK! exists because Kia Mau Festival built a mechanism to pay for it. The Wellington festival launched He Toi Puaki as a new commissioning initiative and CONJAH were its first recipients; the result was the duo's first full-length directorial and performance debut. It premiered at The Great Hall at Massey University on Buckle Street — the old Dominion Museum building — over three nights, 5 to 7 June 2025, at 8.30pm, with tickets at $15 to $35. The listed running time was 60 minutes.

The credit list reads like a long development process rather than a quick commission. Lighting design was by Elekis Poblete Teirney, sound design by Oliva 'Spewer' Luki and No Pity, and Kasi Valu produced. Grace Iwashita-Taylor mentored the work and also contributed a featured poem alongside Noʻukahauʻoli Revilla. Byrin XIII Mita was dance coach, Alisa Thia the physical conditioning trainer and Josaia Wasasala a guest performer, with Shaquille 'HALF QUEEN' Wasasala as opening act. Support beyond Kia Mau and Creative New Zealand included residencies at The Banff Centre's D.A.I.R, Dancenorth's A.R.T programme, LGI, Ūkaipō, The Sauna and The Pool Haus.

The work itself: a bestiary, not a narrative

The framing CONJAH use is a bestiary — a catalogue of creatures rather than a plot. The piece is set in what the company describe as a subterranean epoch between the collapse of one world and the birth of another, a bodied va or vata. Rather than staging that collapse, the work gathers the forms that thrive in the descent: the unnameable, the mutated, the beyond-body, the weird, the hybrid, the reborn, the buried, the unmade, the decaying, the endless.

The means are blunt. Two performers shed their skin and, in the company's phrase, become the unbecoming, using genre-bending dance, character performance, harsh vocalisation, sound distortion and larger-than-life design elements as catalysts. Harsh vocalisation is the detail that explains the show's later musical direction — the screamed, distorted register of extreme metal used as a score rather than as accompaniment. Poetry sits inside that sound world rather than around it. The stated purpose is remaking and remembering amid ecological terror, which puts the work nearer to ritual than to horror despite the content warnings it now carries.

Melbourne, motion capture and a mixed verdict

Between the premiere and the Auckland season, CONJAH spent much of 2026 in Melbourne on a different piece. GG — gaming shorthand for 'good game' — ran at Arts House in North Melbourne through to 30 August 2026, playing Saturdays at 2pm and 7.30pm and Sundays at 5pm, at 55 minutes. Wasasala and ooshcon performed alongside Henry Lai-Pyne, Harrison Hall, Byrin Mita and Sam Mcgilp, using motion capture and digital avatars to work through control and choice.

The review in My Melbourne Arts was mixed, and worth reading as a check on the duo's ambition. It praised the ensemble and the combination of street dance, gaming technology and digital design, and singled out a puppet-theatre sequence for having 'one of the most expressive hands'. Its objection was cohesion: strong individual passages that did not accumulate into an argument about agency, and a participatory finale that read as 'an action for the sake of participation instead of a meaningful conclusion', leaving the concept 'frustratingly out of reach'.

The distinction matters for what follows. GG tested CONJAH's appetite for technology inside a six-performer ensemble; DARK!DARK!DARK! is the work in which the two of them are the material.

The Auckland season, 16 to 18 October 2026

The Auckland staging is the Tāmaki Makaurau debut of DARK!DARK!DARK!, co-presented by CONJAH and Auckland Live inside Tempo Dance Festival | Te Rerenga o Tere. The festival marks its 25th edition from 13 to 18 October 2026 with 27 activations and more than 160 artists across theatres, galleries, car parks, cinemas, train stations, studios and streets. DARK!DARK!DARK! takes three nights of it, 16 to 18 October, at 8pm in the Concert Chamber at Auckland Town Hall, with tickets at $25 to $40 and a 14-plus age recommendation.

It is a bigger show than the one Wellington saw. The listed running time has gone from 60 minutes to one hour 40, and the billing now names live metalcore, costume, sound and immersive promenade design as its components — a move from a studio-scale two-hander to a promenade work in a civic concert room. Elekis Poblete Teirney carries over from the premiere, credited as lighting director, with Steven Junil-Park as costume director. The listing promises creatures, cosmic forces and fractured memories, and warns for horror themes, strobe lighting, haze and loud sound design.

Demand across the festival is measurable: a release on 1 October 2026 reported that roughly 40 per cent of the ticketed programme was close to or fully sold out, with about a third of the whole programme free to attend. Neighbouring works in the same week include Rebecca Jensen's natural basic and Sefa Tunupopo's seki, both on 13 and 14 October, and a double bill from Deanne Butterworth and val smith on 16 October.

Where that leaves them

The critical record on DARK!DARK!DARK! is still thin. The premiere ran three nights in a university hall, and The Spinoff's Kia Mau reviewers said the flu stopped them covering more of that final week. The Auckland season does not open until 16 October 2026, so what exists for now is the company's own documentation, the funder and residency trail behind it, and the GG review — which points to a duo whose strongest asset is the physical event rather than the concept note.

That makes the Concert Chamber run the first proper test of the work at scale. A 100-minute promenade with a live band asks considerably more of the design team than a 60-minute piece for two bodies, and the work's own logic — gathering creatures instead of telling a story — puts the weight on whether an audience can be held in that structure for that long. Three dates is a short run, and the festival's sales report suggests it will be a full one.