DANZ QUARTERLY No 1 September 2005
Community Dance
Connecting with Dance Round the Street Corner
Petra Kuppers is the first recipient of the New Zealand Fellowship in Community
Dance from Otago University. She is the Associate Professor of Performance Studies
at the English and Cultural Studies Department, Bryant University, New England and
Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Projects. In this abridged
transcript, taped at a lunchtime DANZ forum at Unitec during the conference,
Petra outlines her plans to Dr Ralph Buck, Head of Dance, The
University of Auckland.
Ralph: Before I start talking to Petra about community dance I want
to place her in context of Caroline Plummer, the young student who four years ago was
sitting on those (forum) steps.
Caroline was a dance and anthropology student at the University of Otago and she died in 2003
of a very rare lung cancer. Before she died, she and her parents decided that they would like
to commemorate her passion for dance by establishing a community dance fellowship. She did not
want a dance fellowship - she wanted a community dance fellowship – something that focussed on
the potential it brings to making community, to bringing the different parts of each of us
together. She was more interested in the holistic, the participative, in diversity and access
all those aspects of dance.
The University of Otago and New Zealand Government have contributed quite substantially to
this six month fellowship, which is open to New Zealanders and internationally. It aims
to recognise writers, practitioners, people who do workshops.
Caroline was one of my students, she wrote wonderful essays, and before she
died she wrote several things. "When we dance it is one of those rare times that our
mind, body, emotions and also our spirits are working as one, consciously directed towards
the same outcome. I can only hope dance can be utilised in more and more positive ways, to
help us embrace the difference that makes our world so fantastic."
So here you are Petra, you are the first person to do something in this. What are you going to
do in Dunedin?
Petra: Thank you so much for making this happen. This is the very first community dance
fellowship anywhere in the world as far as I know. Community dance has always been one
of the step-children of dance. I am deeply honoured and hope the work I do will honour
Caroline’s wonderful vision and the strength of community dance both in this country and
internationally. I am keen to make a connection between dance practice that is
going on around the street corner, in university departments, and dance that makes its way into
research publications. My interest is in straddling those three different areas
– the local community, our international dance community and the research community.
When I first saw the fellowship advertised, one of the first ideas that came to me was the idea
of mapping. Mapping – creating relationships between bodies, the inside of bodies and
landscapes. Being in landscapes; being in the environment. This is something that has been
very important to my practice – finding ways of working with different ways in which people
see themselves as part of an environment.
I am German and like many Germans there is a strong nature philosophy, a nature romantic,
poetic approach to being in landscape. I then lived in Wales for ten years - you are surrounded by legend, by ways of making sense
of your landscape effused with stories about giants, elves and fairies. You can’t walk the land
without having some sense of what these stories are. They are very much part of life, so
community dance has always had a strong relationship to that. And I hope that some of
these issues will come up in my engagement with people here – that people will have a very
strong ownership or sense of belonging to the place that they are from. I know that is true for
Maori, I assume that to some extent this will be true of the European, Pacific, Asian and other
immigrant communities in this country.
We are going to look at mapping - one of the core ideas, using both legends and ways in
which we think about our bodies and about our landscapes. Since I wrote my initial application, I
have been further refining my project, so my plan right now is to work for six months in a
cancer-based environment. This could be a range of places – I have worked in hospices before.
My main area of work as both practitioner and theorist is in disability culture. I
am a disabled woman. Most of my dance experience is in a chair. I am not a very
experienced bipedal dancer, which makes me a disabled dancer. Disability culture is my main
framework, so I am going to work from this perspective. I gather from Caroline’s writing
that she is very interested in this kind of work - validating different ways of being in the world,
different ways of living. I am stunned that Caroline actually read my work. It just gives you
a sense of how these distant dance counties are actually connected up, how we have all these
invisible threads that connect us, so I hope to play with this idea.
My work is about finding pride in disability, in disability culture – it is never about trying to do
what the non-disabled culture does. Other people are very good at that. I am interested in
creating work within disability culture.
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