DANZ QUARTERLY No 10 December 2007
The Dance of Life
By Francesca Horsley
Internationally acclaimed choreographer, Lemi Ponifasio has just been awarded the 2008 Creative New Zealand Choreographic Fellowship. Francesca Horsley discusses his work and the role of the artist with him.
Choreographer Lemi Ponifasio takes dance seriously. He is not in the entertainment business. He sees the artist as having a critical role in society. He wants the artist to be a player in the society, a leader, and catalyst for change, not just a silent observer.
The founder of MAU Dance Company, Lemi is an embodiment of his ideals and has created profound works that draw attention to past horrors such as nuclear testing in the Pacific and present day effects of colonisation, super-powers and globalisation.
“There is no boundary between dance and life; dance is a lived life,” he says. He feels what we call dance has become too much like a fashion show, manipulated by marketing and pop culture. “Dance for me is a conscious way to live life intensely - culturally, socially, intellectually, spiritually and as an animal of nature.”
“My work is not an escape - it’s an intense encounter with the self. That’s what you are doing during the performance. There are enough distractions in the world right now so I want the theatre to be one of engagement, seriousness. If you decide to walk out - well that’s also a valid opinion.”
His involvement with core issues in Aotearoa was demonstrated vividly on the day of our interview. Meeting at MAU’s dance studio at the Corbans Estate, Henderson, Lemi was anxious about his friend and lead performer in his latest work “Tempest” – Tuhoe activist Tame Iti. Instead of talking to me, he would rather have been in Rotorua, visiting his friend who had just been arrested as part of the raids on his village of Ruatoki in the Urewera. But always charming and courteous, he sat with me on rustic benches in the dimly lit, cavernous converted winery warehouse and discussed his life and work.
Born in Samoa, Lemi, of his own volition, left his family and village of Lano as a teenager to study in Auckland. While at Auckland University studying political science and philosophy, he became interested in dance and saw its embodied knowledge as more political and philosophical than academic textbooks. He trained in ballet and contemporary and began experimenting. He also joined the traveling Takitimu kapa haka group led by Tama Huata in Hastings and toured to Canada, visiting Indian reservations.
“It was exciting because I was finding out about what other people called dance – why is an arabesque artistic and not the slap dance? So dance has always been a thought provoking act for me. For example, Samoan dance you don’t do – you are Samoan dance. Samoan dance is not so much the correct execution of a movement, rather your appropriate state of awareness to the multiple relationships. Awareness is valued over the artistic. Knowing dance is knowing how to sit, walk and talk – to understand your relationship with humans and all things.”
With eyes opened, Lemi then embarked on developing his own dance, spending 12 years as a dance artist in Tokyo and Europe, mixing with avant garde artists, architects, filmmakers, poets.
“The whole process of dance for me is a search, a pursuit of knowledge, an exploration. I was attracted to people who were seeking other questions, other answers, other ways of being. I used to dance almost every day for many years because dance was a living out – you don’t think about it, you don’t make it up like a pre-packaged revelation, dance was very much the life of the body.”
This came to an abrupt end in 1995 when his apartment caught fire, destroying, among other precious possessions, all the video recordings of his solo work he had made over a decade. This calamity propelled him to return to the Pacific and found MAU.
Lemi adopted the name Mau from the name of the Samoan independence movement, established in 1908, that practiced sustained non-violent resistance to German and New Zealand colonial rule. It is a Samoan word meaning both ‘vision’ and ‘revolution’. “For me the Mau was not saying that Western cultures are bad, but rather it was expressing what it is to be Samoan. ‘I’m a Samoan, how do I meet the world from my perspective?’ ”
His works reflect this knowing - what it means to be from the Pacific. Yet they also look out into the wider world, offering incisive social and political commentary that merges with traditional cultural practices – at any one time provocative, challenging, soothing. In ‘Paradise’ (2003) a man slowly circles, seemingly reeling from the impact of nuclear radiation. ‘Requiem’ (2006) digs deep into ritual, mourning and renewal in a time passage where strange birds and running dancers inhabit a surreal world, and ‘Tempest’ (2007) tells the story of dislocation, the loss of rights, featuring not only Tame Iti, but also Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui.
While these works are appreciated by a devoted yet relatively small audience in New Zealand, they command considerable respect and full houses in major theatres in Europe. MAU travels abroad annually, performing at the Holland Festival and the Venice Biennale. ‘Requiem’ was commissioned as part of Peter Sellar’s New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna in 2006 and was performed at the Southbank Centre in London in September 2007.
Performing in the major centres in Europe is a deliberate strategy. “I used to dance everywhere, on the streets, in bars, villages, everywhere and still do. But I found that it is more powerful to go and dance in the powerful places where the powerful people are, who are making powerful decisions about us. They will sit for 90 minutes and watch and listen – so for me it is much more effective than to dance under the tree, in the garage or on the beach.” MAU will be performing at the Lincoln Centre, New York in August 2008.
For Lemi, it is also important how we view dance, to understand where dance is coming from. “When the Lincoln Centre asked us to come – I suggested they come and visit us – they came. Dance is a serious human exchange. It is important they experience our environment, how we live our lives so when we go there they understand where we are coming from – it’s a conversation, we have to make relationships that are deep and meaningful. If dance is supposed to be an expression of your life, why do it in a meaningless way?”
Likewise his dancers are specially chosen. They come from all walks of life – fishermen, bus drivers, lecturers, factory workers. “When I make a dance I don’t think I’m making art performance but trying perhaps to bring forth a lifeworld, a shared common understanding. That is why I asked Tame and the same with Ahmed. For me the stage is not a place to play pretend. I am not making political theatre. As a contemporary dancer, the work is where I find myself. I am working with Tame – now he is in jail. I can’t escape that – this is my reality. Why should art be in a vacuum?”
His new work, ‘Birds with Sky Mirrors’, is inspired by the Kiribati Islands. Six of his dancers come from the Kiribati, the smallest of all the Pacific nations, and he has visited a number of times. The Kiribati is intensely vulnerable; exposed to global warming, badly polluted and dependent on the vagaries of foreign aid.
‘Birds with Sky Mirrors’ is about a fragile beauty, the beauty of sadness. “For me their islands are islands of broken dreams. If you know you are going to lose something there is a certain profound sadness one feels more than when you have lost something.”
The work will be set mostly to Mozart. “I want to connect this performance to his music – I want a global sense because this is more than a Pacific story – it’s an issue we all share.”
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