Art Heals Rifts And Lives
ALVIE MCKREE
In a time of crisis, is art essential? We might have been locked away and, in some parts of the world, this is still a grim reality for many. But there has been a lifeline in the form of the arts. The world has turned to consume an unprecedented amount of literature, film, drama, podcasts, live streaming of poetry, dance and theatre; as well as engaging in a whole range of practical arts-based activities. Dione Joseph catches up with artist/performer Alvie Mckree and dancer/choreographer Eddie Elliott to discuss the role of art in healing and shaping a better future for us all.
“For me, art is service,” says Alvie Mckree. “It offers a way through crisis and I see artists as holders of a vision that can help us get through — whether it’s a personal moment of reckoning, a tragedy like the death of George Floyd or a global pandemic.”
An interdisciplinary artist, arts therapist and Qoya teacher, Mckree’s whakapapa on her mother’s side is Ngapuhi and Ngati Kahu ki Whangaroa; and on her father’s side Yurumein/ Barbados. Both lineages are integral to her work.
“I came to art looking — and staying with it — primarily because of the therapeutic benefits it offered, whether I’m writing a play or a poem about my lived experience growing up Black and Maori here in Aotearoa; or whether I’m working with textiles and dyeing fabrics — it’s always about moving towards a place of healing and restoration.”
Mckree also facilitates therapeutic art workshops, offering Qoya — movement that combines yoga and dance — and ceremonial gatherings for women, using performance and textile-based installation as a means of healing the rifts in her cultural identity caused by colonisation, migration, and the transatlantic slave trade. Most recently, she has also been invited by Black Creatives Aotearoa (BCA) to join their Black Out Series, a online interview platform that will feature 13 Black New Zealand artists across 13 weeks responding to the impact of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter Movement.
It’s another step towards understanding, engaging and finding ways through crisis with art. As one of the first interviewees for the series, she is looking forward to sharing her insights during this tumultuous time.
“We may have come out of lockdown but we haven’t come out the same and it might not be nameable, but it is palpable. People are different and, when we engage, it feels different. I’m still trying to make sense of that in my head and in my day-to-day work.”
To do this, Mckree is currently working on a project involving both her grandmothers, Ripeka Paapu (maternal) and Gladys Mckree (paternal). “The idea came to me long before Covid and started off as a way to strengthen my connection to my whakapapa, re-tell their stories within my own work and also start to heal that rift.
“It’s also an attempt to weave myself back into that story and lockdown has given me all this time at home. It made absolute sense to be stitching, weaving and dyeing with plant material that’s growing in my garden and along the road,” she says.
Mckree is also looking forward to developing her first play, Black Maori Girl, with support from BCA, a story she hopes can offer others insight into what it was like growing up both Black and Maori in the 70s and 80s in Aotearoa.
“I deliberately position myself as a Black Maori woman because for me that signals my Blackness but I don’t have a lived experience of being Afrocaribbean,” she says. “This play is essentially a story of a young girl struggling with her frizzy hair and her mum, who’s at her wits end because she has straight Maori hair and doesn’t know what to do with her daughter’s afro.
“It’s funny, because I feel both Black and Maori artists use humour to respond to our traumatic past and it’s a tool that helps us cope and process our own stories.”
All of Mckree’s work is linked by a strong belief that the opportunity to share stories is incredibly therapeutic. It’s fundamental to her belief in the transformative power of art to help us survive.
“The stakes are now higher than ever around our expectations of transformation — if it had just been Covid, that would have been one thing but it was also the murder of George Floyd,” she says. “This crisis has enabled us to be witness to Floyd’s death in a way that wouldn’t allow for a brief moment of grief and then business as usual — we need to tell our story in a way that makes space both for ourselves and for others, because only then does true healing take place.
“As an artist it’s the combination of finding the right medium to explore an idea or an issue as well as having people around you to talk story with — and that is where the intersection between art and healing resides.”
Black Out Series, live from August 16, on BCA’S Facebook page.