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Dark Tourists - a dance tourist responds... (2007)

Author: Derek Tearne

Email: derek@tearne.com

Publication Date: 14 March 2007

This is a personal response to 'Dark Tourists', and also to the public reaction which has accompanied this new work by Malia Johnston and Emma Willis. This essay also serves to acknowledge how important contemporary dance has become in my own life.

A little over a decade ago I went to my first contemporary dance performance as a rather suspicious and somewhat reluctant observer of a new art form. My opinion of dance, based on a few short TV clips and poster images, was of a rather abstract form with pretty movement and very little substantive content. It really didn't seem like something I would enjoy, but of course the only way to find out is to try. At the time I was further hampered by the opinion that if I couldn't understand something it must be 'Art' and I had yet to encounter the term 'postmodern' in the wild. As I donned my metaphorical boots and pack and took the first steps down the dance trail I had no idea what was ahead: I was an observer disconnected from the environment and community I was about to explore. I had no guidebook to help vindicate my opinions, although I did have the advantage of a rather good native guide.

That first dance performance was 'Relentless' by Black Grace. It was not what I expected, or could possibly have imagined. Just over an hour later my preconceived notions were crumbling in the dust: I'd just watched an all male company take on serious social and political issues through the medium of dance. To a certain extent the work was very literal, it also clearly contained several layers of symbolism, context, text and movement vocabulary that were pitched somewhere over my head – however I could see their shape in the distance and found myself excited at the prospect of exploring this new world of symbolic content.

The next few years on this journey into art were of gradual enlightenment and growing understanding. I was absorbing almost by osmosis terms like deconstruction, multiple coding, postmodern, although I really had little idea of what they meant in practice. There were biennial trips to Wellington and occasionally Australia, to experience the best that international arts festivals could offer, and a few moments of enlightenment, like watching Douglas Wright dance and as a consequence discovering the joy of pure movement, but nothing pivotal or redefining. I was discovering that dance, far from being merely abstract or formalist movement, was an art form capable of taking on any subject from domestic violence to urban planning. Those were heady days of exploration, and as an outside observer I could feign lack of understanding and opinion when it was convenient to do so.

In the 2000 international arts festival in Wellington I saw my next redefining art work, Iets Op Bach, by Les Ballets C de la B. This was a redefining moment in my life, similar to stepping on a plane and emigrating to New Zealand; staring across the African Rift Valley; traveling through Arthurs Pass; standing on the Sand River Gneiss; the first parachute jump; the moment I grasped the concept of recursion. These are moments when the observer, changed by the environment, becomes part of that environment and is no longer completely a tourist. A light has turned on in ones brain that can never be turned off, and all other lights will be compared against this light.

After seeing Iets Op Bach I found myself not only using terms like "massively parallel narrative", "multiply coded" and postmodern, but understanding what they meant – the next day I revisited Te Papa and began to understand what that meant too. This work took on several of the hard issues of modern life head on, with no punches pulled – at every point action, effect and consequence were demonstrated in a series of parallel, simultaneous interconnected events. The set was on three vertical levels, with a baroque musical ensemble playing Bach on a fourth, and action took place in all parts of each level. There were several themes running through the piece, including issues of gender, commodification of sex and objectification/sexualisation of early teenagers. For example, the cast included an 11 or 12 year old girl (I believe there were four in the touring cast, but only one performed on any given night). The audience was challenged by having to explore their own reaction to this pre-teen girl dancing the same provocative dance steps as the adults around her. The audience were disturbed by this dissonance, as they were intended to be – it was a remarkably prescient warning against global trends in marketing to teens.

Iets op Bach demonstrated to me how performance art with a movement focus can, and to my mind should, tackle even the most difficult issues. Judging by the critical acclaim and regard this work is held in internationally, mine is not a minority opinion. My point of view had changed from ill informed observer to having an view point which coincided with far better informed international opinions – I no longer felt like a naïve tourist in the world of art consumption, more like a repeat visitor returning for specific experiences.

It was a densely packed symbolic work, and clearly there was too much content for most people to grasp in one sitting – certainly there were huge chunks that I didn't even attempt to understand. What surprised me in conversation afterwards with other festival goers and seasoned art consumers was that some people really didn't get any of it, or even get a sense that there was something to understand.

The choreographer did a presentation/Q&A session the next day. This was in many ways as fascinating as the work itself. We learned that the European touring model for works of this kind is to spend 18 months in full time development before taking the work on tour for a lifetime of around three years. No wonder they could produce a work so rich and overloaded in symbolism. We also heard how difficult it had been for the company to get recognition in their own country until they managed to tour their first piece outside Belgium.

Since 2000, I've craved performance art at the conceptual level of Iets op Bach.

Now to the present day and 'Dark Tourists'. A local work, developed sporadically over six months and premiered in the Auckland Festival. The cast and set are smaller and far less elaborate than Iets op Bach, and yet many of the same qualities are there. The piece addresses some deep and fundamental issues affecting the world today. It is rich in symbolism, and both characters and scenographic elements are multiply coded and the narrative is non-linear. It differs from Iets Op Bach in that it is not quite finished – which is hardly surprising as we saw Iets Op Bach after 18 months of development and 2 years of touring, and Dark Tourist after 6 months interrupted development and one preview.

It's also one of the few works I've seen that have approached Iets Op Bach in richness of content and its profound commentary on the human condition. The work is awash with content, and yet one reviewer stated "…we were none the wiser, uninformed by the proceedings and distinctly lacking in any empathy".

This is entirely at odds with my own reading of the piece, which I found both informative and deeply moving.

The set devices are multiply coded. There is a building which is at various times a toilet, a house, a shop, a bus, a hunters hide, a trophy cabinet, a surfboard and many other things. There is a cage made of plastic sheets which is at times both restrictive and protective of the solitary bird who resides within, and of the humans characters. Coats appear throughout the set of Dark Tourists, hung from above, casually dumped around the stage, and worn/removed by the dancers. These represent the feathers/bodies of birds and a cloak protecting people from the environment.

Each character is multiply coded, being at various times a bird, a human and a dark tourist. The characters are all suffering loss of some kind, either as birds or humans, and that loss is due to the actions or inactions of humans and to a lesser extent the birds themselves. The bird characters are used as examplars for the failing environment, to demonstrate that neither evolution or flight will ultimately allow escape from confinement/extinction/endless repetition of mistakes. Birds are also the ultimate tourists, migrating from place to place primarily because they can, and a desire to escape inclement weather for warmer, or more stable climes.

The last bird can be taken literally, as one of the many bird species which have been brought to extinction by human hand, or metaphorically as the last of a kind - the last commercial steam engine - the last of the V8's - the last clothing factory in the New Zealand, or simply as a metaphor for loss. Indeed there are several last birds who appear in the piece, the bird in the cage, the bird shot by Peter's granddad, Mia the last bird/last tourist.

The cyclic nature of the narrative - returning to themes 'did it happen here' and reusing devices such as the 'last bird' reflects the cyclic nature of extinction or techno/social replacement, where we mourn briefly the loss of one depleted resource, put a premium value on the very last of the line, before moving onto the next resource to deplete. There is the great conflagration where the last birds, are pulled from the sky by disease/hunting/poison birds/quarantine – and there is tourist who doesn't let a major environmental disaster get in the way of a nice bit of sunbathing.

Each of these elements are connected, and to find one is to follow the twisted branches to the others. I don't pretend to have made all the connections, or that all the connections I've made are the ones intended by the artists.

The text, delivered in song, sound score and spoken word, is well balanced against the movement. The spoken word supports the movement and the movement carries the strongest emotional weight. The movement, narrative and sound score are interesting and beguiling in their own right and support each other generally successfully.

To my eye this work in progress is an example of the kind of informed, postmodern, cross genre work that is so highly acclaimed overseas.

Some people found 'Dark Tourists' bleak and unpalatable. Well, yes, the destruction of habitat and environment for short term human ends is unpalatable, the inevitable consequence of mass species extinction, including our own, is bleak.

In full disclosure I should confess that my own knowledge of the subject matter helped me find access to the work and also a very literal personal reading of the some of the events depicted. At the point where the coats were pulled from the sky they became in my mind the last flock of passenger pigeons, 250,000 birds slaughtered in one night by hunters who knew it was the last flock. The passenger pigeon was once the most numerous bird on the planet, over 5,000,000,000 birds, the largest flock was estimated at around 2,000,000,000 birds. It provided the cheap protein source for America throughout 1800s until 1899 when the last wild bird was sighted. In 1910 a $3,000 reward was posted for a breeding pair – the reward was never collected. Martha, the last passenger pigeon died in caged captivity in 1914. This is not the only literal reading that is possible. The symbolic events depicted in 'Dark Tourist' aren't just indicative of what might happen, they are what has happened over and again. The references to salt flats and receding oceans could refer to Lake Chad, formerly one of the largest bodies of water in Africa, now almost dry due to the effects of global climate change.

We are now past the mid point of the worst mass species extinction event since the one before the one that dealt to the dinosaurs, and experiencing rampant global warming at the same time. Many people are unaware of this even though extinction and global climate are almost daily headline news. We are collectively like Mia, the oblivious tourist wandering aimlessly around sleeping or dead birds/humans/tourists. A recent article in the peer reviewed journal science predicts that the worlds commercial fishing stocks will all be non-viable as a food source by 2048. We have been lurching from environmental disaster to environmental disaster since we ate the last mammoth. Soon there won't be anywhere left to lurch too.

This is difficult material to address, and is of fundamental importance to everyone on the planet.

I applaud the creative team for taking it on.

I find it disturbing both as an environmentalist and as an art consumer that there seems to be a body of audience members who found the work devoid of meaning. The issues addressed by this work - loss; environmental destruction; extinction; consequences of actions - are fundamental issues.

Perhaps we can ignore them in this work because we've become so adept at ignoring them in our own lives.

The essence of 'Dark Tourists' is everything I have come to crave in performance art - rich subtext, interconnected themes and serious social commentary for the mind, a sympathetic, a well crafted soundscore for the ears, and movement to satisfy the eyes - the possibility of fully engaging the senses, mind and soul within an artwork.

This is the kind of work my own journey has allowed me to appreciate and crave.

I hope this work is allowed to continue its own journey to completion, and that the authors can find a way to enable more people to access the rich content within.

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