Lumina: Let there be light

New Zealand Dance Company rehearse Lumina. Photo / John McDermott

Lumina unites movement, projection and design, writes Bernadette Rae

The place where light, sound and movement meet has always been a hub of creative exploration for Shona McCullagh, MNZM, New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate, Westpac/Fairfax Woman of Influence, Hynds Creative Entrepreneur of the Year and artistic director of the New Zealand Dance Company.

The intersection of image, movement and interactive technology has long informed her work as choreographer, dance film-maker and installation artist, and was the basis of her brief to the three choreographers contributing to the dance company's Lumina season of new works, its third such season, but the first in which the choreography has been commissioned from other artists.

"Lumina looks at the architecture of design, of projection and their special relationship to movement," she says of the theme running through the three works.

Malia Johnston, creator of the "bold, loud and rich" Brouhaha, with composer Eden Mulholland and AV designer Rowan Pierce, has been working in a similar realm for several years: for World of Wearable Arts and in her theatre pieces.

Louise Potiki Bryant, winner of the Harriet Friedlander Award in 2014, has explored the use of projected images from her earliest choreographic days with Atamira. Potiki's work for Lumina, titled In Transit, is "a vivid reflection of the traces left behind in the Maori ritual of encounter".

Stephen Shropshire, a Netherlands-based American choreographer, contributes The Geography of an Archipelago in the company's first international commission, a co-production with the Holland Dance Festival. Shropshire found the technology of projection was "not where my interest was going" and focused instead on the relationship between movement and light - or more truthfully, shadow.

Stephen Shropshire.

"In the Western world we want to see everything," he says, "to put on all the lights." On a recent pilgrimage to Kyoto, Japan, he was drawn to novelist Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows and the idea of a beauty more subtly illuminated, and of the ability of shadow to create a cave-like quality: perhaps, metaphorically, the "cave of the heart".

The heart of Shropshire's new work is a questioning of what it means to be in isolation or exile, as migrant or artist: homeless, landless and nationless.

The title refers to "archipelagic thought", a notion first suggested by artist and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, who stated that "against the cogency of globalisation, no single or co-operative identity might be fixed or irreversibly established". In an increasingly globalised community, where more people start to wear the same clothes, speak the same language, think the same thoughts, we struggle to find a sense of identity and of community, explains Shropshire.

The inner tension of trying to establish an identity can erupt in violence, he adds. "Those living in lands receiving more and more migrants can also feel displaced."

Born in Miami, and half Puerto Rican, Shropshire believes the influx of Caribbean people there has led to such a dominance of the Spanish language that it has made life very difficult for the non-Spanish speaker, presenting "a microcosm of what is happening now on a much larger scale".

"I am not saying anything political in my work," he says, "apart from highlighting the human struggle of finding identity, of maintaining identity and trying to belong. But I think about these things, and the ideas sit on the back of my neck and I hope the meaning comes through."

Now a permanent resident of the Netherlands, Shropshire has a real and personal experience of exile and belonging.

He moved to the Netherlands 16 years ago, on the advice of his "master master teacher" at Juilliard's Dance Division, Benjamin Harkarvy, because of the strong dance culture there.

Shropshire did not begin any form of dance training until he was 18. "I was training as a classical opera singer instead," he says, "and I had this deep desire to go to Juilliard. But at the time they were not auditioning for singers - just for dancers."

So audaciously he auditioned for that instead - and won a full scholarship.

"It was a good match," he says. "I was very flexible and had a good body for dance. I was very turned out and open. And I was a good sponge. Juilliard's technique was to strip students of everything they had learned previously and then to rebuild."

The classical technique learned at Juilliard is still honoured in Shropshire's choreography - and in his views on dance.

"I love ballet and the idea of technique as the foundation," he says, "but technique is not valued as it once was. Today, dance is seen to be more about ideas than technique - and it will be the death of the art form as it produces dancers who can't dance.

"You cannot disregard technique until you understand technique.

"We have a responsibility to uphold the legacy and understand on whose shoulders we stand."