DANZ QUARTERLY No 3 April 2006
Dance with a Difference
by Catherine Pattison
Many of the hospice participants worked with this beautiful and careful attention to the breath of life in nature, expressed in small tender gestures and attention
The heart of Petra Kuppers’ work during her Dunedin-based Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance was centred in the place where the young dancer spent her last days.
A disability culture activist, Petra spent four of the residency’s six months visiting the Otago Community Hospice honouring Caroline’s vision. Before she died of a rare lung cancer, aged only 24, Caroline had written this entry in her journal:
"For me, the ultimate career would be one in which I could marry dance with healing, music with rehabilitation, movement with improved quality of life. I believe that dance is unique in the way that it challenges both mind and body.”
Petra shares Caroline’s visualisation of dance’s holistic power and through her sessions based at Otago University, has repeatedly affirmed dance’s ability to communicate differently and to celebrate community.
“Dance for everybody, as a way of sharing space, breath and stories. That was the core of the work I led in Dunedin and I feel it is deeply connected to Caroline’s vision.”
An associate professor of Performance Studies at Rhode Island’s Bryant University, Petra’s core work involved sharing our nation’s stories and speaking about the connections we have with the land. One of the participants summed this up, during an evaluation session.
“It is about participation of ordinary people, making dancing accessible to everybody, bringing it back to storytelling, claiming dance back for everybody.”
Petra led six Dance with a Difference workshops at the University’s Physical Education department, plus additional visits to the Dunedin Cancer Society to find participants.
She performed workshops and healing rituals at former mental health hospital, Seacliff, with participants from various day care centres around Dunedin. Further Dunedin workshops were held at various libraries and the Disabled Persons Assembly.
Masterton Rural Education and the King Street Arts Center - open to people with mental health issues - and James Hargest College in Invercargill all hosted Petra’s workshops.
She gave talks for the Otago University Anthropology Department, the Dunedin College of Education, Brisbane’s Griffith University and the DANZ Conference, Tuanui Whakamanu Dance Canopy 05 in Auckland.
Petra says one project that was “one of the absolute highlights of my visit” was a four-day Christmas Hui workshop at Otakou Marae for Moana House (a therapeutic community for offenders). “They were incredibly welcoming, and very open to sample with the kind of storytelling dance vocabulary I work with and merge it with their traditions. We had a great time and they produced some amazing dance work based on their experiences.”
Working at the Otago Community Hospice, Petra led group and individual sessions, with in-patients and day patients. “We mapped parts of our life experiences onto specific landscapes and memories of these landscapes, using movement as a way to access memory and make places more vivid in our mind. I also brought in a lot of material (stones, bark, pieces of trees, shells) in response to stories told to me and places mentioned. And we again used small movement and gesture to respond to them and their energies.”
Beginning with some regional myths, Petra extended and reinforced the patients’ memories before moving towards thinking about places and spaces they had felt comfort, called home and which were important to them.
“Many of the hospice participants worked with this beautiful and careful attention to the breath of life in nature, expressed in small tender gestures and attention. This was very moving to me, and I feel privileged to have been able to witness this work.”
They took photos of their hands and skin, which Petra colourfully manipulated, responding to suggestions and echoing the content with which participants imbued the specific movement or moment captured.
Petra took some of the concepts, storylines and memories generated there into a wider context. In her community dance teaching at Otago University’s Physical Education department, she and the students performed movement gifting sessions - when one person tells a story, they receive a movement back in return.
From these they pieced together short choreographies out of everyday movement, which they exchanged with the public in non-dance environments, such as a library and shopping centre. Although some students were apprehensive, they found “wonderful riches once they gave it a go”, Petra says.
“People were very generous and we had lovely chats, to elders, children, local people, tourists and a 95-year-old ex-dancer, who were all fascinated with our project.”
Petra’s “Dance with a Difference” workshops, recruited participants who wanted to partake in stories and creative movement for people who do not think of themselves as dancers.
Hospice staff members, people from the Cancer Society and those from other organisations interested in movement and health joined the public. Taking the photos and stories from the hospice as a starting point, they created dance material around one core myth, which was filmed by a research developer at the Dunedin College of Education, Dr Nancy Higgins. As the videographer, she was able to visually represent the project’s essence by creating a DVD.
She says it demonstrates how imagery, music, sound and movement can transport the observer on an imaginary waka. “I filmed six women, who would be considered an odd assortment to the usual observer, paddling an imaginary waka in a broken gym. I could actually hear the waves and see the paddles in their hands. I also saw no reason why six women with bent backs, crooked fingers, red flannel checked shirts, sweat pants, grey hair, blonde hair, and big and small bellies would not be paddling this waka on the ocean in search of the Moeraki Boulders. The rhythm in the waka and in each of Petra’s sessions was easy and seemed to match each imaginary wave that crashed in the broken gym.”
In mid-October, Petra’s pulled together the participants from her various workshops to perform Coastal Mappings a number of times in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s foyer. Projections of the dance video played, collaged and cut with the hospice photos. Maori music created by an albatross bone accompanied these images.
“Once people had a chance to see the videos and photo projections and look at the photos we had displayed, we then invited them to join us in a circle. I then shared one of the myths that had emerged from the hospice and that we had worked on in the Dance with a Difference sessions. Then everybody together improvised a short movement sequence, so that we ended in a circle dancing together.”
Informal interviews with participants revealed the benefits of Petra’s projects with many talking about the pleasures of story-telling and of using stories, metaphor and images as ways into movement. A hospice patient spoke about the project’s spiritual dimension and another talked about how her dancing helped her to connect with her children.
Petra also wrote An Introduction to Community Performance during her time in New Zealand, which she describes as a “toolbox.” In handbook format, it is full of exercises, inspirations and practice examples from practitioners worldwide. It will be published next year with Routledge and she hopes it will be a useful resource to people who want to work in community settings.
“I believe that dance is linked to breath and to acts of breathing. This means that everybody, every living thing, can dance and can connect with others through this. For me, community dance has less to do with where you can place your leg or arm and more with forms of connection and respect for each other’s differences that you can find as you move together.”
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