The precarious planet
The New Zealand Dance Company’s new season mixes deconstructed Vivaldi with a touch of Korean Zen for works reflecting a world of worry.
The NZ Dance Company’s new season mixes deconstructed Vivaldi with a touch of Korean Zen.
The dancers move in and out of patterns, interlock, then glide, gingerly, as if skating over thin ice. Choreographer Sue Healey stops the hauntingly beautiful music, bringing the rehearsal to a close. She’s pleased but exhausted. All are hard at work, creating The Seasons Retouched, one of three works for the New Zealand Dance Company’s new season Kiss the Sky. Also in the programme are choreographies by Kim Jae Duk from Korea and Australian Stephanie Lake.
The intensity of the violin music recalls Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; in fact, it’s a pared-back reworking of the masterpiece Recomposed, by German-born British composer Max Richter.
“I don’t usually work with this style of music,” Healey says, “but I was immediately drawn to this because it is very lush and cinematic. Richter has stayed very true and respected Vivaldi, of course, but he has cut and pasted and chopped bits out.”
Healey draws on the emotional qualities that each describes. But she uses the work to make a political statement about what she calls “our place in the natural world and the precarious state of the environment”.
“Our seasons are changing so drastically and the natural order of things has become twisted and skewed. I am using images of us playing with the planet to the point of destruction – skating on thin ice. Are we past the point of no return?”
Healey was born here, but like many talented dancers, she settled across the Tasman as a teenager. Now, 37 years later, Australians regard her as one of their own, and she has won multiple awards for her choreographies and dance films. She returns regularly to see family and friends, but this is just the second time her choreography has been performed in New Zealand. “I have often found it impossible to bring my work here. There are so few opportunities; it is infuriating.”
Her 2012 dance film Virtuosi was a tribute to the dancers of her homeland. She interviewed and filmed eight expatriate Kiwi dance artists working around the world, creating a moving archive of connection and distance. This sparked an idea for a much bigger work in Australia, where she has made filmic portraits with dancers, then mounted a large installation where the dancers interacted with their digital selves.
“People are loving it, and it was huge in Australia. Now the idea has been bought by Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan – I could spend the rest of my life doing these works.”
The artistic director of the New Zealand Dance Company, Shona McCullagh, says she wanted to align Kiss the Sky with the Matariki Festival. “I have always wanted to create a programme that looked at the arc between Australia, New Zealand and Asia and a kind of position within the southern sky. I gave the same brief to all the choreographers that for me it was about connecting with the fragility of beauty, and of course the planet in its current state is in a fragile space.” Precariousness is one of the recurring themes that runs through Healey’s choreography. Her only work seen here, Fine Line Terrain, was made in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq. “Now it feels even more precarious.”
A Matariki programme “connects with the fragility of beauty, and the planet in its current state is a fragile space”.
Whereas Healey’s work takes a global view, Kim has turned inwards for his Sigan ( time). He aims to create a sense of Zen meditation, although McCullagh calls it a “high-octane Zen”.
Writing from Seoul, Kim says “when I thought about Kiss the Sky, I was inspired to turn more inward, to find direction on my new creation. I leaned towards my traditional movement, which feels comfortable, initially, but there’s something about the words ‘kiss’ and ‘sky’ that sparked my imagination and turned my attention inwards also.”
Kim says meditation is at the core of the inspiration for his movement: “I look at movement in two ways. First, I think about nature in a literal sense – the great outdoors. I choose words such as wind, waterfall, air and eagle. Then I apply a principle such as attack and re-attack. Then I think about nature in the ways of a human being – what is our nature? I think about the words associated with both ideas and how they make me feel.
“These feelings and connotations are then translated into movement, which is how I really see my method.”
Kim found it challenging but enjoyable working with the company’s dancers in Auckland earlier in the year – and he discovered similarities.
“In the traditional aspect, Korean dancers are able to grasp those elements due to our culture, but I think New Zealand dancers also have respect and understanding for traditional movement through the connection of Maori culture. These dancers really picked it up quickly – more than other Western companies.”
Kiss the Sky, New Zealand Dance Company, Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna, Auckland, June 29-July 1.