Different but the Same the Second Time Around
By Francesca Horsley

You could say that the very utmost has been made of Denys Trussell's seminal poem Dance of the Origin.

It began life in 1980 as part of a collaborative venture with choreographer/ dancer Ali East - focussing on elemental relationships with nature and dance, and with our indigenous consciousness.

In 2003 -2004 it inspired a major series of works by Southland artist Nigel Brown. These paintings have in turn inspired another dance work. And the dance, poem and paintings are now the subject of intellectual and artistic discourse.

The new dance had its premier as an accompaniment to the opening of Nigel Brown's exhibition in the Milford Gallery, Dunedin in October this year, and has just had another outing in Auckland's Wallace Gallery. The paintings, music, dance and poem have all been a cause for celebration of the present and past.

These creative forces have brought together the innovative and quirky, the elegant and rustic and have marked a journey of political protest and social awakening.

The work was collaborative from the outset. In 1980 Ali and Denys were flatmates in a large communal house in Auckland. They set out to create a totally integrated performance of dance, poetry and music. This inspiration, born in the dancer's daytime studio and late in the poet's night, shaped a work that succeeded as a powerful performance and an enduring and seminal poem. Once the dance work had shape, music by Ivan Zagni was brought in, and quickly established its own third voice.

The concert had a three day season at Auckland Grammar's Centennial Theatre, and the poem was published - and that could have been that. However, the seeds that lay with the concept and works proved to be a powerful catalyst.

It marked Ali's first attempt at talking about issues of land through dance and cross-disciplinary performance and became her mode of working. "We formed Origins Dance Theatre for that concert and we built from there, so each dance was an evolution of the ideas from the original." she says. Throughout the eighties and nineties she has produced a number of works based on environment ideas and social protest.

It was Denys's first volume of poetry: he has now completed seven, and has gone on to be an award winning author. Brown's impressive collection of over 30 paintings and woodcuts were described by Dunedin's Milford Gallery owner Stephen Higginson as among his best work yet, with some of the larger works commanding a $25,000 price tag.

Over time, the nature and length of the dance has changed dramatically. Framed in 1980s environmental and political protest it was a serious, elemental and ecological piece with dancers engaging with the landscape and interpreting life's processes - elemental rock, sea, tidal forces, insect like creatures, cosmic whirling energies, women giving birth.

It lasted an hour and a quarter, had two narrators and five dancers; Ali, Wendy Preston, Raewyn Schabl (now Thorburn), Holly Cooper and Stephen Lardner.

Stephen and his son tragically died in a car accident ten years ago, and his mother and daughter attended the Dunedin performance.

This 2004 revisiting has three dancers; Lyne Pringle, Kilda Northcott and Valerie Smith accompanied by three Otago musicians, composer and violist Alan Starrett, Trevor Coleman and Peter Adams. It lasteda slim five minutes, and was a chunky, witty interpretation of rural New Zealand featuring gumboots and Celtic gigs.

Choreographer and dance lecturer at Otago University, Ali says "This time the impetus was to complete the cycle. It is a completely difference dance, a completely different concept. The choreography was inspired in this case not directly by the poem but by the paintings that were inspired by the poem. We called it Dance of the Origin 2, for lack of a more imaginative title."

"I didn't even read the poem again. We lifted the images for the dance directly off the paintings. We studied the paintings, Nigel talked about each painting, his ideas and inspiration. We combined these into an evolving collage of ideas, little scenarios really".

"The second dance used Nigel's concept of the dancer figure in the New Zealand landscape; human beings toiling on the land. The first dance was more abstract with the dancers interpreting the energies of nature."

Denys says that Nigel had used photographs taken of the original dance and his intuition to create some of the works.

He said that Ali chose to respond to an element in the paintings that was not really in the original choreography.

"The element in the paintings that she wanted to respond to was the vernacular, almost at times grotesque, and quirky imagery of a rural New Zealand that was almost being satirised."

"For all that," he says, "the music has quite a large curve to it, like the original dance - and sense of a progression through movement. And there were moments when a kind of undertone came through that related to the original production."

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