Our Work

What do we do with damage done?

Subverting the premise of a corporate shred event, a mundane act of disposal becomes a choreographic inquiry into grief, transformation and the limits of repair.

Tangled between transformation and restoration, SHRED EVENT searches for a form of repair that acknowledges what cannot be reversed.

Developed with Performance Space, Sydney & Critical Path

Performances:
Asia Pacific Performance Lab, 2025
Cementa Festival, NSW, 2026

Choreography & Performance Design – Jessie McCall

Performance Collaborator – Sofia McIntyre

Full Length Work – 60min
Presented by Footnote New Zealand Dance
Choreographer: Jessie McCall

A turn to dream logic – unruly, queer, ethically imaginative, as a way to hold onto meaning in a time of overlapping crises.

Paradises slip their frames. Unexpected pleasures co-inhabit with the unthinkable. Spectacle flirts with collapse.

BIG LOW DREAM is a laborious rehearsal of possible futures.

Pageant Moon is a recollection of intimacy, on loop. A kaleidoscoped pair of lovers. A mother and child blurring together in the shallows.

This outdoor movement installation invites you into a nostalgic dreamscape of softening and breaking - slowly, mentally, cellularly.

Pageant Moon extends Presley's continued exploration of death and dying from a queer Māori perspective. It holds close the slow, small, and sometimes unnoticed losses we experience as humans, and the indistinct but vital impacts of these mundane grievances upon the way that we move through the world.

Presented at F.O.L.A (Festival of Live Art) 2025, at Myers Park splash pad

Performance: Tamsyn Russell, Miriam Eskildsen, Lulu Qiu, Sasha Matsumoto, Sydney Magnus

Choreograhper: Presley Ziogas
Costume and Set design: Presley Ziogas

Imagine being a fig wasp – born pregnant.

Imagine the sex of mould.

Imagine mothering as a botanical project that broke its banks.

The Bloom leans into the generative glitches of queer propagation.

Made in collaboration with creative production studio RDYSTDY, and performers Sofia McIntyre, Raven Afoa-Purcell & Sasha Matsumoto

Unruly female emotion was once attributed to a deviant womb wandering through the body.

Our flesh is cast as monstrous in its capacity to feel.

‘Testimonial’ and ‘attest’ both derive directly from ‘testes’ – the gateway to truth is gendered –
horror is a woman who knows.

Pop, misogynistic horror tropes, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the sexist history of our health system, soft porn, Barbara Creed’s ‘Monstrous Feminine’. I Get So Emotional Baby looks at the ways in which women’s ownership of their own emotional and bodily realities is systemically threatened.

Basement Theatre, Auckland
October 2022

Choreography – Jessie McCall

Performance – Anu Khapung, Sofia McIntyre, Sharvon Mortimer & Evie Logan

Costume & Sound Design – Jessie McCall

Producer – Zoe Nicholson

Images – Jinki Cambronero & John Rata

Moon in Cancer is a nostalgic and tender duet exploring themes of pop-astrology and the intimate care between women.

Dancers - Hannah Raimon and Jessie McCall

Independently presented, April 2023

Choreography: Presley Ziogas
Set design: Jessie McCall
Dramatrugical Support: Jessie McCall

Daybreak Estate pours you a glass of cheap champagne in mourning for the outright violence that we inflict on our planet.

A sick wellness retreat. A kaleidoscopic plush party on a sinking ship.

Equal parts social elite and primal pack, we are dangerously disconnected from the earth and yet face down in the mud.

Herald Theatre, Auckland
April 2022

Little Andromeda, Christchurch
March 2022

Herald Theatre, Auckland
Experimental Dance Week Aotearoa, 2020

Choreography – Jessie McCall

Performance – Liana Yew, Terry Morrison, Rosa
Strati, Sharvon Mortimer, Olivia McGreggor

Costume & Set Design – Jessie McCall

Images – Jinki Cambronero

A short dance film created by Presley Ziogas and Jessie McCall, premiered for TEMPO Dance Festival 2020.

A feminine body attempts to Infuse water into flesh, to saturate tissue. Exploring the longing to return to a place of comfort while knowing it may no longer exist.

Presley Ziogas – Choreographer/Performer/Designer.

Jessie McCall – Videographer/Director/Editor.

IDYLLIC TISSUE. Imagined in an alternate reality, perhaps it is a dreamscape. Intricately exploring, texturally opposing and isolated movement qualities. It is so mundane. A place of being submerged in texture and tissue. A place to reference the euphoric nostalgia. The place I dissect and experience through dreaming.

Performers: Raven Faasu, Amber Joy, Presley Ziogas
Set design: Jessie McCall

Presented at Short + Sweet dance Festival 2019

TREAT - This piece explores the feeling of being an outsider, playing with the blurred lines between being shunned and being idolised. It looks at the unexpected similarities between these two positions, where rejection and adoration can both place someone apart from the crowd. The work considers the shifting nature of being seen, judged, and made into something other, questioning how easily we move between fascination and discomfort, and what it means to be both watched and misunderstood.

Choreographer: Presley Ziogas
Lighting design and costume design: Jessie McCall

Performers: Nea De Brink, Libby Valentine, Abbie Rogers, Presley Ziogas, Sophie Greig and Kimberly Green

Presented in Short + Sweet 2018