KEY POINTS:
A new production showcasing the talents of up-and-coming teenage dancers, Renu O Te Ra: The Edge of the Sun, is proving that youth dance in Auckland is far from dead.
Urban Youth Movement, masterminded by Black Grace's Neil Ieremia, rocked and ricocheted around town in years gone by. But Ieremia is now concentrating solely on the re-establishment of his new-look company.
Veterans of the original Black Grace, Taiaroa Royal and Taane Mete, have joined forces with Ann Dewey and her Spinning Sun company in conjunction with The Edge. The new venture had a first showing as a work-in-progress in May's Ignite Festival.
Another ex-Black Grace dancer, Jeremy Poi, whose own career began in Urban Youth Movement, is also mentoring the new batch of young dancers.
The work had its genesis last December when 12 dancers, with various degrees of experience in hip-hop, tap, jazz and ballet, met for a two-week workshop. The process began with lots of talking about the deepest concerns of youth today.
"Their main concern was quickly identified as being the environment, global warming, rubbish and recycling," says Royal. "Those ideas kept coming up again and again."
So the primary themes of Renu O Te Ra are rubbish, waste and the disposable society where people, too, can get buried under yesterday's news. A simple set features wheelie bins, old newspapers and plastic bags - which can evoke not only environmental plunder but the wings of a bird or an insect, the twirling cape of a matador - and are also highly effective as a percussion instrument.
The work has developed significantly since the Ignite Season and a second showing at the Bay of Islands Youth Festival, where a representative of the Wellington International Festival expressed interest.
"There is more meat and substance," says Royal, "with a whole new section using the wheelie bins, and improved transitions between sections. The company is working with a much more extensive lighting rig - and a proper dance floor. It is a far more professional performance."
Life for Royal, post-Black Grace, is "fantastic", he says. "I have fingers in quite a few pies."
At 46, and still dancing like a 20-year-old, Royal has been busy performing in the past three seasons of Maui, in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland, and as a dancer and choreographer, in the Wearable Arts show.
He and Mete are also working, in tandem, on a new work to premiere in June or July 2008, going by the working title Q.
"That is going to be a five-act work," he says, "with choreography by Taane and me, and an act choreographed by Michael Parmenter and another by Douglas Wright."
