Dancing to the Dunedin beat
Artistic director chooses to inject Flying Nun influence into his Pango/Black project
If Moss Patterson is hard to pin down, it’s not surprising. The choreographer and artistic director is always on the go, effortlessly jete´ -ing between professional engagements and community-based gigs. His most recent community piece, One: The Earth Rises, was for Tempo Dance Festival, and Patterson says such projects are satisfying but intense.
“Working with communities requires so much compassion. You have to consider people’s lives . . . show a lot of empathy.”
You mean you can’t yell at them as you would professional dancers?
“Well, it’s a different type of yelling,” Patterson says, goodhumouredly. “Sometimes we’re working with 200 people; you have to talk loud to communicate.”
If talking loudly to a crowd wasn’t exhausting enough, he did so while forming the Tohu Dance Theatre. He treats Tohu as a holding space for all his work, encompassing his love of dance, theatre, music, art and writing.
However, his next project, Pango/ Black, which begins a North Island tour on Saturday, is for Atamira, the dance company at which he was founding artistic director from 2010.
Unlike One, Pango/Black is fully professional and was originally commissioned for the Pulima Art Festival in Taiwan. It also featured at the Guangdong Dance Festival in
Guangzhou, China, the first New Zealand work to appear there.
In rehearsals, Patterson asked the dancers to respond to ancient prayers and whakapapa relating to the beginning of time, Te Kore, the void where potential is limitless.
“Using prayers and whakapapa for inspiration was awesome but very challenging; it took us to a deep level.”
While the dancers react to prayers and whakapapa, the live musicians react to the dancers, improvising within a framework set by Patterson, who enlisted James Webster, one of our senior players of taonga pu¯ oro.
Webster brings more than musicianship: “He’s able to interpret a lot of where we take the dance in terms of Ma¯ ori philosophy . . . in a lot of ways, he acts as a kauma¯ tua and a kaitiaki or guardian.”
Pango’s other key musical figure comes as a surprise.
“I grew up in Dunedin and listened to a lot of Flying Nun bands,” Patterson says. “I thought I’d love to have that influence in this piece; there’s a sense of wanting to do something different, and a noapology sentiment, but also a very creative, simple beauty.”
So, Patterson’s choice to inject that simple beauty was Shayne Carter, legendary frontman of Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer. Carter quickly bought in to Patterson’s vision.
“He said, ‘That sounds fantastic’,” says Patterson. “He goes, ‘Look, I’ll come up [from Dunedin]. We’ll have a cup of tea and do some recording, we’ll see how it goes.’ Three days later he was on a plane.”
But Pango/Black isn’t just a gettogether of like-minded souls; there’s an important subtext, too.
“I’m interested in empowering brown people,” Patterson says. “I’m also interested in creating greater respect and practising openness and understanding.
“We can only do that by having courageous conversations with each other. This piece is a courageous conversation.”