Dance, ecology, improvisation - the unique voice of Ali East

Francesca Horsley talks to Alison East, choreography and dance lecturer, Otago University

Dancer, choreographer, educator. Ali East embraces each of these roles with an enthusiasm that is undiminished. Her journey as performer and teacher began 25 years ago and is characterized by a distinctive vision of dance; to express the body as nature, as an integral part of the earth and biosphere, and equally, to explore the body as self and as art through improvisation.

Her dance life has serendipitous beginnings. After leaving school her main interest was athletics and gymnastics, and she was steered towards physical education. "I didn't know there was such a thing as studying dance at university level. When I arrived at Otago in 1967 for my education degree I walked into the dance studio (the same studio I teach in now) and by the end of that first class I said 'This is what I am going to do - I am going to be a dancer'." "At that time there was a three year diploma that included dance study theory and practice. You graduated with a diploma of physical education and studied dance as a compulsory course in your first year. After that, it was optional. Otago was the only place that offered that kind of theory based dance study, and I wonder how many people went there because of the dance programme."

Early influences included Alvin Ailey, Eric Hawkins and Alwin Nikolais. The books of Doris Humphrey and Margaret Doubler on teaching choreography were the main texts at the time. "But I also read art theory and hung out with a lot of poets and artists. It wasn't until later that I really studied Hawkins technique."

After graduating, Ali taught at Otago, and then like many dance people at that time, went to America for further study. "In the States I took Joan Skinner ReleasingTtechnique classes at the University of Washington for several years and studied African American dance."

"Joan's choreography classes were marvellous.We would make one-second choreographies. I translated these later into one breath choreographies and I still use them for new students. So I had a combination of image-based work and very torso orientated 'out there' African dance. My body was very flexible and gymnastic and I needed an energy outlet. I became involved with contact improvisation in the 70s and really enjoyed bringing my gymnastics into dance."

Ali's background in dance had been very little as a child. "At five, I had done Highland dancing and a little bit of being a daffodil or something with Shirley Dale (nee Tippets), one of those marvelous private sector dance teachers, in Piopio in the King Country. But I never studied ballet until I went to States and joined an adult ballet class."

On her return in 1978 Ali had become very interested in performance improvisation with live music. She began teaching at Limbs Movement Theatre. With visiting American Bridget Davis, she introduced New Zealand to Skinner Releasing Technique. She also taught many classes - for mothers and babies, children and adults, choreography and improvisation classes. During this time her interest in environmental issues developed. "It was a combination of my own interest and concern and being influenced by people like Denys Trussell."

This lead to the formation of the Origins Dance Theatre, made up of musicians and dancers. The first show was Dance of the Origin to Denys' poem Dance of the Origin. "We used dance as a political mouthpiece - to raise awareness and for fundraising. Small concerts covered anti-mining, antinuclear ships, Native Forest Action and the Kokako, and assisted Chilean refugees from Pinochet's regime."

"Origins also put on one or two major performances a year with seven, eight or sometimes ten dancers. The company was very flexible, with new members or a new combination of musicians and dancers for each work. Sometimes we would also dance to poetry or in response to visual art. In 1982 as part of our Earth Rhythm concert we danced responses to ten Haiku by Denys."
Also as part of Origins, Ali and flutist Bruce Robertson travelled the country, teaching music and dance workshops. They worked in community halls and schools. "We did this for 15 years, traveling all over the country. Bruce was an English and music teacher, and played many ethnic instruments. They became part of our flavour and the African dance fitted in well.

On each visit we would run African dance, choreography, drum, music for dance, children's, babies and mothers workshops." One of Ali's specialties was environmental dance walks. "We would walk into the bush with the students and Bruce would play his instruments and we would listen to the sounds of the birds and the students would look and gather bits of forms and shapes - whatever - and we would go back into the hall and make work about them. If there was some environment issue in the local community, the group would get together and make a work about that. Many of these groups continued to meet weekly or monthly to make dance works"

For Ali, teaching and the choreography always went side by side, feeding and forming each other. "It wasn't about trying to put ourselves out there as the grand company, it was just trying to get communities of people together and use dance to interact."

She has never thought of herself as a solo performer. "I was always interacting and working with the musicians, I saw performances as conversations between music and dance."

In 1988 she had a major career shift and embarked on setting up New Zealand's first contemporary dance diploma. "Limbs disbanded its teaching programme at the end of 1988 leaving only night classes and holiday programmes. At one of the country workshops I met a young dancer - Karen Barbour - who wanted to be a dancer fulltime (she hadn't studied ballet), and study choreography. But where? So I became inspired to set up a full time programme."

With a group of committed dancers, and supported by the newly established Performing Arts School Trust, she began building a full time contemporary dance programme with an emphasis in choreography at Eden Lodge in Auckland. Ingenious financial strategies and careful programming over the next three years saw the creation of the National Diploma of Contemporary Dance.

"Dorothea Ashbridge taught from the beginning, and was a marvelous supporter of the diploma, she was our right arm, she was fantastic." The legacy from those early years includes graduates such as Neil Ieremia, Claire O'Neill, Morag Brownlie, Fleur De Thier. "Our focus was to train choreographers, people who could go out and create companies themselves or create jobs - and they did. "It was about independent self responsible dance artists who had something to say for their own sake and some kind of connection or relationship with the environment of Aotearoa. That was always part of the kaupapa of the Diploma. We would have guests and artists to talk about their life, the way their work connected with the local landscape. Every year we had a dance camp, which I still continue in Otago. We went out to Whatipu and spent three days relaxing together, going on forays and studying the environment and dancing with nature."

Unitec approached the Performing Arts School, offering to build studios "to die for" and so the school moved to Western Springs. "The acting department and then the film and TV production department came after that - but dance was the first to move to the new campus."

After eight years of commitment to the school, Ali returned to teach at Otago University, taking her ongoing commitments to improvisation, dance and the environment. She is now interested in the ecological processes of making dance; process rather than product, with the ecological aspects of the work more embedded within the work. "The way one image will evolve and transform itself into the next seamlessly, so the body evolves changes and transforms itself from one image to the next through time, and through the imagination. So one minute you are seeing one thing and the next minute it is changed into something else, like a kaleidoscope."

Improvisation is still very dear to her heart. "The way I teach dance is from a very intuitive place. I use my interest in improvisation and try to draw the students into an interactive, spontaneous mode of writing, moving and drawing spontaneously." "I think we are coming back to this now - people like Lyne Pringle and Kilda Northcott are really interested in improvisation and trying to further that end. There was a great big gap in the middle 90s where dance ran back to the theatres and became very high end expensive, finished product, big numbers. Economics caused it to pull back in some ways to solo performances, smaller venues, a more intimate kind of interaction between audience and performer - but that is where some of us have always been."

Every year she organises two days of improvised performances between the music, design, theatre and dance studies departments and members of the Southern Symphonia orchestra.

"It's all a bit 70s retro. It coincides with my teaching a history paper, so it references the Judson's era. The musicians are top performers who love to improvise, and we have become highly attuned to each other. We meet the night before to create the programme, and make an arbitrary list; for example a musician and dancer for a duet, and to be totally retro we put names in a hat and produce a dance say between the videographer and two dancers, or videographer and musicians, or a lighting person and musician. There are a core half dozen people who have been in every show since 1997, plus others, and we do an hour of improvised performance together."

She still takes her students on dance camps as part of her dance and community paper. "I might bring in a guest biologist or a local environmental artist. We also have theory on eco-philosophy and prepare ourselves with authentic movement exercises, to bring people into a sensitized mode of being and seeing the world. Then we go for a long weekend in the Caitlins and go on eco-dance walks.

The demands of lecturing leave little time for political protest but Ali still manages to make works such as a fundraiser for the Waitaki River protest, or a poetry reading. Origins still exists - last year she formed a small group to perform her response to Nigel Brown's paintings which were based on the Dance of the Origin poem by Denys Trussell.

She is at present completing her Masters which gives written shape to her work of dance and ecology. "I am writing about what we have been doing for years either in dance making, choreography and the dance/eco walks. I realised that there was some kind of underpinning theory to these practices that I have been doing all these years. They fit together in practice, but the thesis has forced me to put these thoughts into words. I am trying to create pedagogy, what I am calling an eco-choreography pedagogy. A way of teaching choreography that really is underpinned by ecological theory. This is where my personal interest has gone. My teaching and theorizing has been shaped by my artistic experience over the past 25 years."

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