For the love of dance
Festival excitement is still strong after 10 years’ directing, writes Dionne Christian
Carrie Rae Cunningham sits at the Botanist Cafe eating prawn and chive dumplings and making me laugh more than I have for a long time. Cunningham, the artistic director of Auckland’s annual Tempo Dance Festival, is recounting how she busted out of Walls, Mississippi, to New Zealand via the University of Memphis in Tennessee, the University of Malta and treks around Europe, Africa and Asia.
She says many of her friends and even her family were puzzled about why she wanted to leave the US, but she’d had itchy feet — and an inquiring mind — for quite some time. Probably, she suspects, since a childhood incident in church which is funny in her recounting of it but, on reflection, enough to leave most right-thinking people wondering WTF?
Cunningham arrived in New Zealand in 2003 to do an MA in dance studies at the University of Auckland and expected to be here for two years: “Sixteen years later, I haven’t left and I’ve now got a husband and three children who weren’t part of the degree.”
The youngest of five girls, Cunningham says her family couldn’t afford dance classes and anyway, in Walls you did jazz or gymnastics because dance wasn’t really a thing. Luckily, though, she had a neighbour who did both and would teach Cunningham the moves.
Describing herself as the family outlier who did “weird stuff”, she didn’t discover dance until she went to university in Tennessee.
As soon as Cunningham started the class, she knew she’d found her place and that dance would be her future. She started with Tempo in 2008 — after working as a professional dancer, choreographer and teacher — employed parttime by its governing body, the NZ Dance Festival Trust, to do various jobs. She took on the artistic director’s role in 2015 and, looking at her 10th Tempo, says she’s just as excited as when she started.
“It’s always a struggle for resources when you work in the arts and it can be a struggle to convince an audience to buy into something that you know they’ll absolutely love if only they’ll give it a go. I’ve had that experience so many times of saying to people, ‘you really should see this’, and they’re a little unsure but they go, then tell me it was amazing.
“I love what I do but, trust me, I’m not raking in the dough and when you consider the hours . . . I could be doing a lot better in the corporate world but I think, ‘does an accountant go home and think and dream about accounting? Do they watch videos of, like someone doing someone else’s tax return and get enthused about how great they made it look?”’
Cunningham’s keen to support midcareer artists. “I think dancers are industrious and they have to be because, in a lot of ways, contemporary dance is the bastard child of the performing arts. It’s not like music, which you hear on the radio and everyone sings along to, or theatre, where’s there’s a script. It’s ephemeral and exists very much in the moment.”
The spirit of collaboration that exists in the dance community excites her. So does seeing dance go in new directions and, this year, she points to the inclusion of political works like Le Moana’s 1918, about the impact of the Spanish flu epidemic on Samoa.
Even first-time US visitors, the LA Contemporary Dance Company, bring a work, Adaptation, that taps into the zeitgeist. Cunningham describes Ebba, one piece on its programme, as being about the different ways to be female and feminine reflecting current concerns about gender.
“With dance, there’s no language barrier — it’s all expressed through movement — and you can say so much without saying anything at all. I think the festival is important because it presents a unique perspective about life in New Zealand, especially Auckland, where there’s just so much diversity that feeds into the dance made here.” Photo / Charles Howell