The LA Contemporary Dance Company make their New Zealand debut at this year's Tempo Dance Festival.
The LA Contemporary Dance Company make their New Zealand debut at this year's Tempo Dance Festival.
Carrie Rae Cunningham sits at the Botanist Cafe eating prawn and chive dumplings and making me laugh more than I have for a long time.
Cunningham, the artistic director of Auckland's annual Tempo Dance Festival, is recounting how she busted out of Walls, Mississippi, to New Zealand via the University of Memphis in Tennessee, the University of Malta and various treks around Europe, Africa and Asia.
She says many of her friends, former schoolmates and even her only family were puzzled about why she wanted to leave the US but she'd had itchy feet — and an inquiring mind — for quite some time. Probably, she suspects, since a childhood incident in church which is funny in her recounting of it but, on reflection, enough to leave most right-thinking people wondering WTF?
Cunningham arrived in New Zealand in 2003 to do an MA in dance studies at the University of Auckland and expected to be here for two years. "Sixteen years later, I haven't left and I've now got a husband and three children who weren't part of the degree."
She describes her puzzlement at hearing Mr Whippy for the first time and wondering if it was the welcoming front of a religious organisation because the theme song was the very same one she sung at her family's Southern Baptist church, Whose Child is This?
"I thought, 'what is going on here?' I had no idea that it was Greensleeves because I only knew it from church . . . " (She sings a couple of verses).
Tempo Dance Festival artistic director Carrie Rae Cunningham.
The youngest of five girls, Cunningham says her family couldn't afford dance classes and anyway, in Walls you did jazz or gymnastics because dance wasn't really a thing. Luckily, though, she had a neighbour who did both and would teach Cunningham the moves.
Describing herself as the family outlier who did "weird stuff", she didn't discover dance until she went to university in Tennessee to study creative writing and English literature, thinking she might be a journalist.
"In the US, you have to do Gen Ed [General Education] courses, which is why it's a four-year and not a three-year degree — they're milking it as much as possible — and there was a physical education paper I could do.
"I decided not to do kayaking or volleyball but picked Modern Dance 101, maybe because I'd seen a clip on PSB television when I was a child of the dancer Paul Taylor — I think it was Paul Taylor; he just died recently — and it enchanted me."
As soon as Cunningham started the class, she knew she'd found her place and that dance would be her future. She started with Tempo in 2008 — after working as a professional dancer, choreographer and teacher — employed part-time by its governing body the NZ Dance Festival Trust to do various jobs. She took on the artistic director's role in 2015 and, looking at her 10th Tempo, says she's just as excited as when she started.
"It's always a struggle for resources when you work in the arts and it can be a struggle to convince an audience to buy into something that you know they'll absolutely love if only they'll give it a go. I've had that experience so many times of saying to people, 'you really should see this', and they're a little unsure but they go then tell me it was amazing.
The dance work Kotahi brings together three choreographers to explore new futures for indigenous contemporary dance. Photo/Charles Howell
"I love what I do but, trust me, I'm not raking in the dough and when you consider the hours . . . Well, I could be doing a lot better in the corporate world but I think, 'does an accountant go home and think and dream about accounting? Do they watch videos of, like someone doing someone else's tax return and get enthused about how great they made it look?'"
Cunningham's keen to support mid-career artists, saying much focus and funding goes to big companies and youth works but there needs to be opportunities for those transitioning between the two.
"I think dancers are industrious and, you know, they have to be because, in a lot of ways, contemporary dance is the bastard child of the performing arts. It's not like music, which you hear on the radio and everyone sings along to, or theatre, where's there's a script to be read. It's ephemeral and exists very much in the moment."
Le Moana's 1918 is an international award-winning dance theatre show
The spirit of collaboration that exists in the dance community, which extends into other arts sectors, excites her and makes her happy. So does seeing dance go in new directions and, this year, she points to the inclusion of more political works like Le Moana's 1918, about the impact of the Spanish flu epidemic on Samoa.
Even first-time US visitors, the LA Contemporary Dance Company, brings work, Adaptation, that taps into the zeitgeist. Cunningham describes Ebba, one piece on its programme, as being about the different ways to be female and feminine reflecting current concerns about gender.
"With dance, there's no language barrier — it's all expressed through movement, which is a universal language — and you can say so much without saying anything at all. I think the festival is an important one because it presents a very unique perspective about life in New Zealand, especially Auckland, where there's just so much diversity that feeds into the dance made here. You don't see anything else like it in the world."
