Choreographer Douglas Wright. Photo / Adrian Malloch
Choreographer Douglas Wright. Photo / Adrian Malloch
Legendary choreographer Douglas Wright returns with a new dance, The Kiss Inside. It may be his last work, he tells Bernadette Rae. ‘The little horse is tired’
It is an ordinary street, on the back side of Sandringham, and an ordinary building, low and closed-looking with gray asphalt in front for parking cars. But inside something extraordinary is happening.
Douglas Wright, Arts Laureate, now nearing 60, is at work on his latest piece of dance theatre, The Kiss Inside.
Wright was once a dancer of shocking, transcendent beauty. Living with HIV has robbed him of that particular physical power but he remains a potent and passionate choreographer - and highly praised writer and artist - whose work after three decades continues to transfix and terrify, entrance and energise, challenge and shake audiences to the core with its audacity, intelligence and unforgettable imagery.
He has repeatedly taken audiences, at least the ones willing to travel, to both Heaven and Hell. But he looks ordinary today - for a devil or a demigod - wearing the dancers' uniform of baggy sweats in shades of grey. He has spiced things up with a pair of soft, bright red leather shoes but nothing disguises the spareness of his frame. His speech is soft and carefully considered.
In the Sandringham studio, set with a tree hanging upside down from the ceiling, a sensual image of spirituality taken from the Kabbalah, five dancers, charismatic, dramatic, arresting even in rehearsal mode, shake out limbs post-morning class, and join Wright and his assistant choreographer Megan Adams around a computer screen.
Auckland choreographer Douglas Wright. Photo / John Savage
The last segment of the work is still new. Wright wishes there was an extra week of rehearsal remaining "to polish, to get the movement into the dancers' bodies, into their souls". In Europe a choreographer has six months to make a work. In New Zealand it is more like six studio weeks, he says. This time he has split his allotted six weeks into three two-week blocks, spread over some 18 months. The negative side of that is getting the dancers back to where they were, each time. The plus side is the extra time it has given Wright to reflect and develop themes and structure.
They begin, this morning, by marking out the section, walking it through. Instructions on placement of particular props - a metal pail, a large stone and who will bring the water jug, towels, facecloth, are precise.
Adams announces a need to test the music levels. A blast of Sufi music galvanises the company into action. Dancers become an animated frieze; they whirl like kneeling dervishes; they cover their eyes, denying temptation, link elbows and circle, limping; two succumb, one just briefly; the other collapses; pays her dramatic penance.
Wright adjusts and prunes as they go, as kind as he is intense in this fine detail. He has spoken earlier of the pursuit of ecstasy, the core theme of this new work, "whether it is sought in eating a chocolate eclair, or orgasm, running a marathon or taking drugs, or in seeking spiritual transcendence".
He speaks of ecstasy's darkest sides: sado-masochism, flagellation and even dismemberment, adding with the authority of one who well knows, that ecstasy is highly addictive.
"Unless it is taken in carefully measured doses," he adds, dryly, as if, consumed without greed, it may not be ecstasy at all.
If all that seems overwhelmingly dark and stomach churning, Wright is quick to assure that parts of The Kiss Inside are warm and human and funny.
"The human condition is absurd, we are absurd, I can laugh myself sick at our absurdity - until I choke on the laughter."
The rehearsal segues into another scene: two women in conversation, which comically disintegrates into a cat fight. A blokey version follows, the animosity stemming from an overly competitive handshake. Then the whole mood darkens ominously and the soundtrack starts to echo the unmistakable crescendos of war.
Five bodies, articulate and alive in every nuance, faces extraordinarily alive, focused, meaning deeply embodied, move: move almost as Wright himself once moved.
"I am lucky to have this team," he says later. "I demand a high level of artistry and physicality. And the dancers need to be there, totally, body and soul."
Sarah Jayne Howard, Wright's special muse, and Craig Barry have been there before, joined this time by Tara Soh, Luke Hanna and Simone Lapka. It was during this final period of work that Wright came to understand, he says, that the search for ecstasy inevitably leads to conflict and war, a subject "continuously portrayed" and particularly played upon in current times with the Anzac centennial and terrible conflict between fundamentalist followers of a so-called Islam and "Christian" nations.
"I don't deal with the superficial and I express things in poetic images. Not everything makes logical sense at the first viewing. It is like a poem. You have to bring something of yourself to it. I am not feeding passive open mouths. The audience have to bring themselves to it, to respond in their own way to it, from their own experience. People tend to think in flocks, but a thinking audience completes the dance."
The Kiss Inside by NZ choreographer Douglas Wright. Photo / John Savage
Wright has several times announced a work as his last, then the seeds for a new one come unbidden. His last work, rapt, for the Auckland Festival in 2011, met a standing ovation in Holland, but did not tour here "for managerial reasons. I don't know why".
That omission had Wright once again, in "shut up shop" mode. Then another dreamlike image came, scrabbling at the back of his mind, he says, like a cat at a locked back door. He resisted, new images joined the first. He was encouraged to go with it by others he doesn't name.
"Just do a workshop and have a look," they counselled.
The workshop proved "there was something there". Commission came, from the New Zealand Festival for 2016. "They have kindly allowed us to do this tour beforehand," he says.
The premiere in Auckland will be followed by performances at Wanaka's Festival of Colour, and in Dunedin and Nelson, all through April. The company will reband at the beginning of next year.
Wright claims his "best times" are in the studio with his dancers, planning things, ideas coming and "the muse whispering sweet nothings in my ear".
