Mary Jane O'Reilly is a pioneering New Zealand choreographer and co-founder of Limbs Dance Company.
Recent Work
An extraordinary contemporary ballet viewed through a film noir lens; Ballet Noir is a meditation on the mysterious forces of darkness.
Featuring twelve of Auckland’s finest dancers, the performance is an exquisite blend of dance, music, filmic imagery and the sensation of smell with featured perfumes adding a unique experiential layer to the performance.
Wearing sharply tailored authentic vintage jackets, skirts and hats, the dancers inhabit a world of secret rituals, rivalries and power struggles, where salvation only comes with a broken heart.
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted for International Dance Day, 2019
In Flagrante / Mouthfeel
In Flagrante is a unique phenomenon in the genre of burlesque. The bastard child of a contemporary dance choreographer / ex ballet dancer and a marketing guy gone feral, the result is an outrageous, provocative and deeply satiric hour of highly sexualised tragicomic female vignettes dished up by a cast of uber hot Kiwi contemporary dancers - gone to the dark side… scored to Austrian Waldeck's smoky triphop album Ballroom Stories and others such as Laurie Anderson, David Lynch and Nick Cave..
A real hit at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, In Flagrante has been an underground cultural hit in its mother country NZ and continues to outrage, shock and thoroughly turn on audiences everywhere it goes.
Lucy Lynch, Maria Munkowits, Amanda Macfarlane at The Civic for Auckland Live Cabaret Season 2022
Past Work
The rich legacy of her MJ's work encompasses many styles of dance including ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, contemporary burlesque and large scale, outdoor site-specific works such as the 1990 Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony and the 2000 Gisborne Millennium Dawn Event.
The repertoire dates back to the late 1970s during her time of choreographing for the nascent Limbs Dance Company.
MJ’s borderless, boundless and infinitely regenerating creativity flows through her work in the medium of dance and its many allied forms, shaping a vital chapter in Aotearoa New Zealand’s cultural identity through to the present day.
Poster for Limbs first tour to Australia, 1979 with Phil's classic Limbs font. Dancers - Adrian Batchelor, Shona Wilson, Chris Jannides, MJ O’Reilly, ,Kilda Northcott, Lynda Amos, Debra McCulloch
Short Films
As a natural extension of her works onstage, MJ has expanded the medium of the moving image onscreen and short film with an extensive body of work.
Some of her works include:
Canopy, 2001 (Dir: Mary-Jane O'Reilly)
Horses Burlesque, 2012 (Dir: Peter Salmon)
Marching Girls, 2013 (Dir: Peter Salmon)
Nurse Me, 2016 (Dir: Kezia Barnett)
What becomes of the Broken-hearted, 2019 (Dir: Peter Salmon)
Canopy - Short Film, 2001
About
Mary-Jane O’Reilly QSM ARAD has had a distinguished dance career spanning over 50 years in New Zealand and internationally. Trained in ballet from age 4, she gained Solo Seal in 1968 and performed with the New Zealand Ballet before studying at the Royal Ballet School in London. After performing in European ballet companies, she co-founded Limbs Dance Company in 1977, serving as Artistic Director from 1979 to 1986, creating over 45 original works.
With co-creative Phil O’Reilly she devised and choreographed the 1990 Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony and New Zealand’s first commissioned three-act ballet, Jean, The Ballet. O’Reilly also directed Auckland Dance Company (1996–2001) and the Tempo Dance Festival (2006–2011). Their innovative cabaret work In Flagrante toured globally, and their Ballet Noir debuted in 2021 at Auckland’s Elemental Festival. Awarded a QSM in 1990 for services to dance, MJ continues to teach and contribute to New Zealand’s dance landscape.
Phil and MJ Black Sheep wearing Black Sheep designs, 1975
Classes
MJ has had a significant impact as a teacher in NZ. In the early years, she taught Cunningham Technique to the Limbs dancers and was the first Cunningham technique teacher for Mark Baldwin MBE (director of Rambert Dance Company, UK 2001-2017). She gave Douglas Wright his first professional job with Limbs in 1980 and has mentored numerous New Zealand dance artists, including Kilda Northcott, Debra McCulloch, Shona McCullagh and Taiaroa Royal.
Today, she continues to teach teach a ballet basics class and an advanced level contemporary ballet class to adults, sharing her deep technical knowledge and finely honed sense of musicality and performance.
She has taught contemporary dance, ballet, dance on film, burlesque and Mindflex for:
NZ School of Dance, UNITEC dance programme, University of Auckland dance programme, corporates (Mindflex) and various workshops and symposiums all around the motu.
Her experimental Mindflex classes for Corporates teaching lateral thinking were popular in their time.
She recently taught her iconic work Talking Heads to the Seasoned Dance Symposium participants.
Amy Moxham as Giselle with her Cynics, Auckland Art Gallery performance 2019
Contact
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Contact us for all enquiries on show bookings, and ballet classes.