The ‘mother of modern dance’
poverty, hunger and war,’’ she once wrote.
Dunlop MacTavish, known as the ‘‘mother of modern dance’’, lived her early years in a whirlwind, from the sedate Dunedin of the 1930s to pre WW II Vienna, from pre-communist China to a South Africa gripped by the horrors of apartheid.
Through all of it she performed and taught dance and was still teaching well into her 90s.
Dunlop MacTavish was born in Dunedin, the youngest of four children. Her father was a Presbyterian minister and professor of philosophy at Otago University.
After her father died when she was 12, her spirited mother, Maud, moved with her two older children to a farm in Southland, where they settled for a few years while the young Shona and her brother Bonar remained at boarding school.
With a love of adventure, Maud decided almost overnight to move to Europe so that Bonar could develop his exceptional artistic talents overseas. (He went on to become a noted sculptor.)
After some moving around, the family settled in Vienna, where Shona, who had always harboured a desire to dance, met and studied with the choreographer and expressionist dancer Gertrud Bodenwieser.
She would develop a life-long association with the dancer, with both eventually settling in the southern hemisphere.
Shona studied with the Bodenwieser Ballet during her two years in Vienna but war was looming. Bodenwieser and many dancers in the ballet company were Jewish and victims of Nazi persecution.
Dunlop MacTavish had already heard terrible stories of her friends being killed, or in one case, a friend who killed his family then jumped out of his window to his death, preferring that to what the Nazis would inflict upon them.
She and her mother helped Bodenwieser get a visa for Australia, standing in line in the rain for four days to secure it. But she struggled to think of ways to help others in need.
Fortunately, a member of the dance troupe’s father was a Colombian diplomat who managed to secure a South American tour for the Bodenwieser dancers.
Using this as a front she and Bodenwieser managed to rescue many Jewish friends who had never danced a day in their lives by including them in the company when they left by train in 1938 after the Nazis invaded Austria.
After their year-long tour, during which Dunlop MacTavish received 14 marriage proposals from various ardent fans, she and Bodenwieser ended up in Sydney, where she would live for the next decade.
Bodenwieser set up a dance studio and made Dunlop MacTavish her principal dancer.
In 1948 Shona, who had a strong faith in God, heard visiting Canadian minister the Rev John Macdonald MacTavish (Donald) speak in church and within five days the pair were engaged.
They were married three weeks later and immediately set off to undertake missionary work in China.
Like her mother, adventure ran deep in her veins. Within a year they were forced to escape Mao’s communist China. They fled first to
Taiwan before being dispatched to South Africa where she again taught dance.
She fought hard against apartheid, joining the Black Sash, a non-violent liberal white women’s resistance organisation.
When recalling the success of one particular show it was not because of the full house or the well-danced performance, it was because she had insisted black and white schoolchildren be allowed to sit together.
Dunlop MacTavish and her husband had three children, Terry, Dugald and Catriona, but life changed dramatically when Donald died.
As a missionary with very little money she was forced to move back to Dunedin with her young family where her older siblings were able to help support her.
She taught dance at Columba College in Dunedin before opening her own dance school – New Zealand’s first modern dance studio – in 1958, injecting an essence of glamour and culture into the sleepy city.
Five years later she started Dunedin Dance Theatre, creating many works that toured the country, often in collaboration with artistic partner, actor and lifelong friend Louise Petherbridge.
During the 1960s and 1970s Dunlop MacTavish delivered workshops on liturgical dance – a type of dance incorporated into worship – in South East Asia.
In 1971 she spent a year in the Philippines as professor of dance at Silliman University. While there she researched dance traditions of the indigenous people, going as far as to ‘‘marry’’ a tribal chief to learn a dance only shown to the wives of chiefs.
Dunlop MacTavish, who was made an MBE in 1985 for services to the arts, was given an honorary doctorate of literature by Otago University in 2001, and in 2017 was made an honorary member of Dance Aotearoa New Zealand.
She wrote about her time in Austria in An Ecstasy of Purpose, and two films were made about her life, Out Into The Blue and Wind Dancer. Her autobiography, Leap of Faith: my dance through life, was published in 1997.
Her students from as far back as the 1950s danced with abandon at her funeral service. Just as she showed them all those years ago, they were able to say in dance what they could not in words. – By Bess Manson
Sources: Terry MacTavish; Leap of Faith: my dance through life. Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz.