Neil Ieremia reflects on 30 years of Black Grace and dance challenges

It was a Sunday morning in Porirua in the 1970s and little Neil Ieremia, aged 6 or 7, was at home, playing happily with his sister, when his nose started bleeding, kept on bleeding, wouldn’t stop bleeding. When it became clear nothing was helping, his mum took him to the doctor.

The doctor, smoking a pipe, listened to Neil’s heart, then took his mum aside. Neil couldn’t hear what was said but he saw his mother’s face drop. Minutes later, he was in an ambulance, sirens blaring, his mum next to him, in tears.

At Wellington Hospital, doctors and nurses crowded around him, trying to take his blood. He wouldn’t let them. He thought: “F*** you. It’s my blood. You’re not taking it.” When he finally acquiesced, it was only because he felt sorry for his mum.

He was in hospital for months. He doesn’t remember how many (“3? 4? 5? 6?”) but he does remember he was alone.

“There was no Ronald McDonald house,” he says.

He had contracted rheumatic fever. It had been caught late and it had nearly killed him.

He was a little boy. He’d been through a near-death experience, followed by months away from his family, not knowing if he’d live or die. It’s the sort of experience that could destroy someone.

He says: “That experience, I think, really shaped the way I thought about myself in life.”

From that point on, his life has been about doing things other people thought he couldn’t, or shouldn’t. His life has been about proving people wrong.

Black Grace, the dance company he founded in his mid-20s, has just turned 30, an incredible length of time for any organisation to survive in the precarious world of the arts, especially in New Zealand. The fact it has survived and thrived is partly about Ieremia’s artistic skill, but at least as much about his strength of will.

Neil Ieremia with his dancers as they rehearse for This is Not a Retrospective. Photo / Dean Purcell

To him, 30 years is nothing. He wants Black Grace to go for 100 years, 200 years even. He wants it to provide training and opportunities for people who look like he does to share their talent and stories with the world.

“I know it sounds a little bit sort of hand on your chest, look up towards the lights, but that’s actually what I want to do, because it changed my life.”

He says he knows what he’s done for the arts and for Pasifika in the arts and particularly for men in dance and he is proud of that, but he doesn’t think everyone appreciates that.

He says half the men on the dance scene in New Zealand wouldn’t be where they were if it weren’t for Black Grace.

“These dudes roam around and they’ve never heard of us. I’m going: ‘Listen here, you little whipper snapper, when you guys talk about OG, you’re talking about 10 years ago. We’re talking about 40 years here, buddy. Before we came along, there was no one that looked like you, that’s for sure, and when they let you in dance school and you couldn’t even take barre? It’s because of us’.”

But there’s a problem. He says the standard of dance training in New Zealand is bad and getting worse. Young dancers, he says, “don’t have the ability to do the choreography any more”.

“People are coming out of dance school, who’ve been in dance school for three years and can’t take a ballet barre. You’ve dropped $30,000 on your education and you can’t take barre?”

His own dance career came from a “zero start”. He took his first ballet class at 19 and exactly one year later he was working for New Zealand dance legend Douglas Wright. To survive and succeed in that environment, he says, he had to work massively hard.

“But today, people just don’t even care. They walk out of school, they’re not fit, they’re not mentally ready. A lot of them – not all of them, but a lot of them – come out and they have this expectation of greatness without having to break a sweat.”

He says the decline in the quality of young dancers has been an issue in this country for two decades, but the dance community here has refused to accept it.

Black Grace under the artistic direction of Neil Ieremia in 2015.

“If I ever mention it, of course, I’m the mad villain. Well, okay, but I’m still the only choreographer that tours internationally on a regular basis, so we’re getting to compare our dancers with the likes of the ballet companies around the world, or Paul Taylor or whoever is coming through before us and after us at the venue.”

The expectations of audiences, he says, are colliding with the reality of this country’s decline in dance training.

In 2005, in an act he regrets, he fired the entire Black Grace company, in the middle of a tour of the United States.

He has said he was burned out. He has said he has tried to repair the damage done and to apologise to those affected. He has said some have accepted his apologies and some haven’t.

He says it’s still raw now. He says it’s all anyone ever wants to talk about when he’s interviewed. He says he has never understood why people want to define him by that one experience.

He no longer wants to talk about it. Except to say a few things:

“There are people who don’t even know me who have this opinion of me. I know that it might not seem like a big thing, but within the arts when people are being actively asked, ‘Don’t go there, he’s a terrible, terrible person’... I’m just like: ‘I’m someone’s son.’ You know, I’m just, I’m a dad, I’m just a dude, and we all make mistakes. We all f*** up.

“If you leave it, that’s one thing. But if you go and actually try and aim to fix things and aim to be responsible for what you’ve done and try and repair it, it’s up to people at that point if they accept that.

“People are always gonna fall, at some point, whether it’s a mighty fall or just a small one, but in this country, and in the arts in particular, I’ve never understood why people refuse to let you up, and in some cases keep you down. That’s the bit that’s got me.

“I just haven’t been able to work it out, whether it’s just because I’m brown and the most unlikely person to be doing what I’m doing in their eyes, or whether people are just flat out jealous.”

Tonight, he will celebrate 30 years of Black Grace with a show called This is Not a Retrospective. He wants it to be true to the members of Black Grace who have gone before and those who are there now. It’s not intended to win any choreographic awards, he says.

Black Grace, (from left, standing) Deija Vukona, Azael Uini-Faiva, Rodney Tyrell, Neil Ieremia, Paige Downard and Caleb Sagala; (sitting) Demi-Jo Sefo and Fuaao Faith Schuster. Photo / Dean Purcell

Yes, he’s choreographed new pieces for it, and yes, they will have meaning, but please don’t approach him after the show and pretend you love them: “I’m a great Public Enemy fan, and I always say to the dancers: ‘Flavor Flav said don’t believe the hype’. People are gonna blow hot air up your arse all the time and if you believe that shit, you’re gonna be hopeless.”

He has no time for the people he calls “foyer f***ers” – people who approach him after a show and say, “Oh darling”, and give him air kisses and fawn over him because they want to be seen in a certain light by a certain type of person.

“For me, it’s just horseshit,” he says. “It’s a complete waste of time in my mind. You either like something or you don’t. People sitting and causing themselves so much pain sitting there watching something unfold and not understanding anything about it and probably deeply disliking it but feeling that they’ve got to say, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so profound!’”

He doesn’t get as much foyer f***ing as he used to. He says people from the “dance community” rarely come to Black Grace shows: the people who come, he says, are typically “the people who pay for their tickets”.

Tonight’s show is going to be a party and it’s going to be his party and he’s going to do it his way, as he always has.

“I do what I want and I do it the way I want to do it, and I really don’t give a f*** about what people have to say about it any more.

“I got into dance to make dance. I didn’t get into it to make friends, and if ever the two come into conflict, then there is no question in my mind about where I go. It’s always the art; it’s always the dance. And that’s cost me over the years, and I don’t know if everyone really gets that.”

This Is Not A Retrospective is on Saturday, March 22, 7.30pm at Auckland Town Hall as part of the Auckland Arts Festival. Black Grace has several special events planned throughout its birthday year. For more info, go to blackgrace.co.nz