Building the dance
Inspired by spooky TV shows like Stranger Things and Dark, a very special dance show is on its way to Nelson Arts Festival. Grant Smithies reports.
Sometimes, a boy just wants to move.
A hectic, itchy feeling wells up from somewhere deep inside, and the only way to release it is to dance.
‘‘I became totally obsessed, man,’’ admits dancer and choreographer Ross McCormack by phone from Auckland. ‘‘If I didn’t do it, I felt like I might explode.’’
He’s bringing his new dance show The Clearing to the Nelson Arts Festival, but his fascination with movement started way back when McCormack was just a kid.
‘‘I was born in Picton in 1977, raised in the Waitohi Rugby Clubrooms, and most of my family’s still in the Marlborough Sounds. Back in the day, my parents owned the supermarket in Picton’s main street.’’
And then, at age seven, his world fell apart.
First, there was a serious accident. McCormack fell from a tree, landed on his jaw and nearly bit through his tongue.
His parents split up soon after. McCormack was a nomad for a while before washing up in Christchurch with his siblings and his mum.
‘‘It was a very strange transition. It was like- Holy s…, you know? I went from living in the bush to the heart of Barbados Street.’’
His salvation during these difficult times? Breakdancing.
‘‘Part of the attraction was that it was forbidden. When your parents tell you not to pay attention to something, it becomes more fascinating. There was just something really captivating about that sort of dancing to me.’’
Compared to mainstream physical pursuits McCormack already understood, like rugby, breakdancing was ‘‘confusing and wonderful’’, he says.
‘‘I would see these dudes doing it on the street then go home and practice those moves, but by the time I got good, breakdancing became uncool and disappeared.’’
Next stop for an aspiring dancer? Night clubs, during the burgeoning NZ rave era of the early 90s.
‘‘I just hit it big time and loved it. I would dance at clubs through the night, and a bit later, I went to The Gathering every year. There were lots of underground raves
around the Port Hills in Christchurch, too. Anything to do with dance just started taking over my life.’’
By this point, McCormack was doing a building apprenticeship during the week. He would flail away with hammers, saws and lumps of wood through the week, dance all weekend, then strap on his toolbelt again every Monday, exhausted.
But dance started to get the upper hand. Long story short: McCormack took the plunge, leaving building to study ballet.
‘‘Ballet was a far cry from dancing in nightclubs, and I was coming in very late as a student, but I worked my ass off to make up for lost time.’’
McCormack graduated from Wellington’s New Zealand School of Dance in 2001, then worked with the Douglas Wright Dance Company and the Royal New Zealand Ballet before joining the Australian Dance Theatre in 2003.
After touring the United States and Europe, he joined prestigious Belgian dance theatre collective, Les Ballets C de la B, and toured with the company for close to a decade.
This wee dancing boy from Picton, the former chippy, then threw himself around stages in Australia, the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Russia, China, Korea, Singapore. Assorted awards and honours came his way.
In 2011, McCormack formed his own company, Muscle Mouth, and has also been commissioned to choreograph works for numerous other dance companies along the way.
‘‘Making a new dance always felt a bit like building to me, you know? When I was a kid, my dad was always building this boat in our back yard, and then over a period of years, you suddenly found yourself in it, out on the water. It’s like magic, right? Using your mind and your body, you’ve designed and made this incredible thing.’’
When McCormack creates a new dance piece, the process is much the same.
‘‘You have to work out what you want to achieve, lay it out, visualize it and draw it up. You source the materials for the set and test the work and refine it all along the way. And your personal flair, the
distinctive way you use your own body, affects the outcome with both building and dance’’
McCormack explored this connection in his acclaimed 2016 work Triumphs and Other Alternatives, dancing within a set that resembled a workshop, surrounded by plaster dust, paint, clay and planks of wood.
That show drew on the familiar stories of Frankenstein and Pinocchio, using movement to tell a tale of a mad professor building two new people and giving them life.
McCormack’s latest show, The Clearing, is a piece he wrote for Footnote New Zealand Dance, this country’s longest-running contemporary dance company.
The day I speak to him, The Clearing has just opened its premiere run with a five-date South Island tour. The dancers then reconvene for more shows later in the year, including the Nelson Arts Festival performance on October 19
‘‘It’s haunting, it’s amusing, it’s sometimes very weird. It’s a full-on dance show, in all its mysterious glory.’’
McCormack is the director and choreographer, and even put his building skills to good use constructing the set. There are five performers from Footnote, who all play characters with distinct personalities.
‘‘The Clearing is probably the most loosely narrative-based show I’ve made. It’s inspired by Netflix shows like Dark, The Ritual and Stranger Things, where there’s a lot of supernatural stuff going in, in homage to old indie horror movies.’’
The plot? Five strangers meet in a clearing in the woods and try to work out where they are, what’s going on and who else might be out there.
‘‘The ground is spongy and soft, which causes strange movements. There’s a big backdrop of blurred forest. And there’s lots of very atmospheric sounds like thunder and lightning. They’re playing scared strangers meeting up, and then a whole series of bizarre events take place, and they try to figure out what to do.’’
Weirdness abounds. There’s a woman who gets attacked by her own jacket and then the jacket turns into a creature. Someone is birthed from a mound of earth.
Of course, even before a recent spate of movies and TV series, the forest has long been an archetypal setting for poems, novels, myths and fairy tales where epic struggles between good and evil played out under magical circumstances.
It’s a location where the usual rules of the natural world do not apply: a symbolic site, a physical manifestation of anxiety and fear, of finding oneself separated from the relative safety of civilization.
‘‘Oh, yeah, for sure. If you find yourself in a clearing and then it gets dark and the moon passes over, there’s no question that you’re gonna be spooked. You will be having a cathartic moment. You’ll be losing your s…, right? So there are a lot of those sorts of dark surprises in this work.’’
And dark surprises are getting increasingly harder to find in live theatre, McCormack reckons.
‘‘A lot of people want to be amused and entertained when they go to the theatre, because things are quite tough and dark out in the real world these days. That’s dangerous, because you tend to end up with a lot of very safe or sentimental or predictable theatre. Art shouldn’t necessarily give you comfort. It’s not always about escapism. People don’t only have light and happy experiences, and theatre should explore other emotions, too.’’
Besides The Clearing, this year’s Nelson Arts Festival features several other fine dance offerings.
There’s My Grooves, where the public can attend an open workshop in which classically trained ballerina and choreographer Lesley Bandy works with two dancers.
And I particularly like the sound of A Call to Dance ,an interactive show in which Maori/ First Nations Australian dancer Amrita Hepi invites local people to teach her their favourite dance moves then builds a performance around the kind of culturallyloaded body movements usually busted out at school discos, marae events, weddings, teenage bedrooms, nightclubs.
How does McCormack suggest audiences get the most from these sorts of shows?
After all, dance is an underappreciated artform in this country. Many people find it profoundly confusing.
‘‘That’s true. Dance is challenging for people, because it doesn’t come with subtitles or explanatory dialogue. You’re watching a very peculiar sort of coded language. The best thing to do, I think, is to just embrace that. We hear people talking all day long and see words and language flashing past constantly on our personal devices, so to extract yourself from that and sit in a dark room and watch something without words, that’s a big ask. It’s no wonder a lot of people come out after a show and go, Hell, I’ve got no idea what that was about!’’
McCormack reckons the trick is to just relax into it and enjoy the magic that arises when music and movement combine.
‘‘Sometimes that will happen outside of dance shows, too. If you’re listening to a piece of music at home and you look at the window and see some guys struggling to lift something heavy onto their ute, there’s some unexpected poetry in that combination. You’re watching the human body desperately trying to achieve something difficult while the music supplies a rhythm.’’
Another key point is that there is no one single ‘‘right’’ interpretation of a dance show.
‘‘As humans, whenever we look at anything, we try to find a narrative in it, and that narrative changes depending on your individual experiences. If you’re heartbroken and you walk along and see a dead bird on the ground, it becomes a metaphor for how you’re feeling. Someone else just sees a dead bird.’’
Dark skies. Strange noises. Something you can’t quite see, following you through the trees.
With The Clearing, McCormack was keen to explore some basic human fears, via movement and sound.
The show is on an extensive national tour until November, and he chuckles away at the notion that it will be leaving people delighted, mystified and freaked out all over the country.
His advice: don’t fight the strangeness. Surrender. Give yourself over to it.
‘‘It’s best if you simply relish not knowing. It’s not often you get to just sit in front of something and enjoy the fact that there’s no obvious narrative. Enjoy being surprised, and let the whole experience be an invigorating romp that provides a new exercise for your brain.’’