Tempo Dance Festival

Tempo Dance Festival is one of Aotearoa’s (New Zealand's) longest-running annual dance events. This year, the proverb ka mua, ka muri (walking backwards into the future) was adopted as the guiding idea to celebrate the past as the foundation for moving confidently and innovatively forward. This philosophy became the central inspiration for the visual identity. A bespoke graphic symbol was developed to express movement, direction and the relationship between past and future. We drew on taki rua, a weaving structure commonly described as “two up, two down,” where rows move in alternating, opposing directions. While rooted in Māori visual language, the form also reads intuitively to Western audiences as an arrow. This graphic identity applied across promotional materials, digital platforms, and festival collateral, capturing the energy and movement inherent to dance while elevating the Festival’s profile in a competitive cultural landscape.