DANZ QUARTERLY Issue 17
October, November, December 2009
Raewyn Hill – Taking One Day at a Time
By Francesca Horsley
An interview at 9am on a Saturday, especially after a show the night before, is a tough call. But Raewyn Hill arrives cheerful; albeit buried in a huge jacket, insulating herself against a Christchurch morning.
We are both in town for her season of Finders Keepers, part of the programme of the Christchurch Arts Festival. Having flown in from Townsville the week before, Raewyn has scarcely had time to acclimatize to southern wither temperatures – or for that matter, with her schedule, any climate.
“I am a little tired,” she says shedding her layers. “I could have stayed in bed this morning – but it’s all right. I am lucky, I am not complaining by any means because sometimes it is really quiet; you are lucky when it is like this.”
“Like this” means she has just completed a two-year artist residency at the School of Dance, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts; has spent ten days in Queensland planning a new programme for her up-and-coming position as artistic director of Dancenorth next year, and is shortly to leave for Paris for a two month Cite International des Arts residency. Making works in New York and Moscow are also on her dance itinerary.
It is over three years since Raewyn left Christchurch for Launceston, Tasmania for a commission by Tasdance to produce the work, A dance for the forgotten, for the Ten Days on the Island Festival. At that time she was disappointed that her dream to set up a repertory company, the New Zealand Dance Theatre, was not to become a reality.
But Raewyn’s time in Hong Kong would prove a watershed. “I think we fought for so long. I have been extremely passionate about being a New Zealand dancer, creating something here for dancers like myself who don’t necessarily want to go away. So I spent a long time fighting for that to happen. But the moment when I let that go, suddenly the whole world opened up to me. It has been a big life lesson.”
Right from the beginning, she set two goals for herself in Hong Kong; one was the Hong Kong Arts Festival, the other to create a relationship with the Rugby Sevens, one of the world’s biggest sporting events. By the end of the two years she had achieved both.
“For the Sevens we had a photographic exhibition and performed live in the stadium with a film projected onto the big screen. The dancers were stars, they entertained the crowd down the steps, and people would cheer and clap. We had a wonderful relationship with Rugby Sevens over both years – wonderful weekends – three days of chaos.
For this year’s Asia Pacific Dance Platform, part of the Hong Kong International Arts Festival, Raewyn presented Vespers, an excerpt from a full-length dance piece Be Still, My Soul, inspired by the painting, The Seven Sorrows by German artist Albrecht Dürer. Renaissance painting has always attracted her – she has a large collection of paintings and prints of the Madonna and other religious figures – and began using artistic works as a catalyst for developing her movement vocabulary.
“Three years ago I began working with actual paintings. We would have the art book in the studio and create movement material from the images. It seemed to very quickly say how you pull the emotion out of the movement; it just sort of fitted really.” She would then apply the movement to her contemporary subject matter.
Despite the high pressure of academic life, Raewyn’s time at the Hong Kong Academy gave her space to interrogate her style. “The extraordinary thing about being a lecturer is that you have to spend time analysing why you do something. I think it deepens your art form.”
“It is interesting to be able to develop your choreographic voice. How do you find your style? In New Zealand we have all come from the same choreographers; have been heavily involved in their process of creating work and given a lot of our own movement and ideas into these works.”
“I don’t even want to shake their influence because I am deeply rooted in Michael (Parmenter), Douglas (Wright) and ballet: these were my aesthetics. So how do you define yourself coming out of that? It has taken me a little while to really develop as aesthetic, my own movement style and physicality. Now I feel more clarity about why I do it. It was such a gift to have two years to breathe for a bit. You never really have that time back here; there is a cycle – you are either making work or you are in the funding rounds.”
Her passion for Renaissance paintings forms the basis of her residency in Paris. She will spend two weeks at the Louvre, studying paintings from the period, before selecting one or two for in depth analysis. “I will research the concept behind the paintings, the artist. I am interested to see what will come out it – that will be the thread for the new piece.”
The seriousness of period finds accord with Raewyn’s themes – she is naturally drawn to substantial subjects, the darker side. “Life, love, loss – that is what I am attracted to artistically. What else is there to talk about?” she laughs. “That is where I go and a lot of artists are in the same place as me – just naturally drawn to those subjects – it is the guts of life really.”
“It’s really funny, I always begin with my cast and say ‘you know what I am going to do this time? I am going to make a really happy piece’ – and everyone rolls around laughing. So I say ‘let’s make a piece, it can be a bit dark bit I will make a really happy ending’ – and everyone rolls around laughing again. I think for a while I felt a little bit uneasy that I couldn’t create something happy – I was really struggling with it. But it is not naturally where I go in my work. I am not being really honest if I am making a very happy, light piece. It is not where my artist brain goes. I am ok with that now.”
“My work is based in reality – I don’t really create fantasies – a lot of people can relate to Finders Keepers on quite a deep level because we have all had an argument, we have all experienced that dysfunction in family relationships.”
In Hong Kong her works received international recognition. While visiting the Academy, Julliard School’s Director of Dance Division, Lawrence Rhodes, met Raewyn and observed her class and work. Having already expressed an interest in working at the Julliard, she was overjoyed when two months later she was invited to make a work for their school’s graduation season next year. She then received another invitation – this time to restage her work Vespers at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow in November.
Is she overwhelmed? With typical seriousness and modesty she says “It’s an incredible honour – amazing! I just take one day at a time. I am lucky”. She is now gearing up for her responsibilities with Dancenorth, which include developing repertoire, touring, inviting guests – “It’s a dream, an absolute dream. Hong Kong really opened up the world. It has such a flow of people going through it and we worked very hard. In New Zealand it is very difficult to get your work seen internationally and that’s what Hong Kong did for me.”
Nevertheless home still fuels her artistic intensity. “While it can be very difficult being here, one side is paradise and I love the isolation. I love creating work here; you don’t have other influences and I find this really positive. The pressure of the small community is restricting but it is also to be celebrated. It burns, stokes my fire – keeps me moving.”
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