The politics of dance

Nicholas Rowe says all societies are multilayered, even those in the grip of war. Photo / Babiche Martens

The epiphany hit Nicholas Rowe when he was performing as a happy peasant in the Finnish National Ballet Company's 1992 production of Giselle.

The son of a judge and lawyer from Darwin, Rowe dedicated his late teens and early 20s to becoming a professional ballet dancer but rather than living his dream he suddenly felt like a prostitute. "I was on stage trying to titillate and scintillate, in a very sophisticated way, the visual senses of the upper class members of this society and I started wondering who I was bouncing and smiling for, and why. "I thought, 'I'm not doing anything to challenge established social orders or address social problems'.

Rather, I was removing myself further and further from society and trading on beauty or at least a 19th century ideal of what was considered beautiful."

Five months later his contract finished and Rowe got on his bike - literally. Aged 24, he bought a motorbike and started a 16-year trek through Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It took him to 65 countries where he worked mainly as a dance educator in some of the world's most traumatised and marginalised communities.

Now, after eight years in Ramallah in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, Rowe, 40, has joined the University of Auckland's National Institute for Creative Arts and Industries as a senior lecturer in dance studies. He wants his students to see themselves as servants of an ancient art form which is powerful, political and capable of changing what we think and, by extension, the world around us.

"There is a tendency to see dancers as mute and powerless but we must never forget that bodies are powerful," he says. "In this sense, dance can become a tool of the establishment, like through national folklore troupes and ballet companies, and can be used to homogenise culture and legitimise power and domination."

But, as Rowe points out, equally it can be used to challenge those structures. "Dance can draw people in, especially those from marginalised groups, and allow them a space for expression and to share ideas. "We communicate on multiple levels but are often focused on the oral, the verbal and the literal.

Dance allows people to use their kinesthetic senses to express ideas and inform each other in ways that cannot be realised just by talking or writing." Unsurprisingly, given Rowe's own sharpened kinesthetic senses, he doesn't only gesticulate when he talks but leaps up regularly using his entire body to add punch and poignancy to the many anecdotes that illustrate how he formed his beliefs - controversial in some circles.

A story about being detained at a military checkpoint in the West Bank becomes all the more real, and frightening, when he demonstrates the "submissive stance" adopted by a group of Palestinian friends to avoid being shot. It didn't save them, however, from being badly beaten. By simply standing limp and twisted on one leg, Rowe provides a more apt example than could be expressed in words of how a body that had, hours before, been moving powerfully and athletically, was left bloody and broken. His experiences in countries like Burma, the Philippines, Ghana, Vietnam, Taiwan, Ethiopia, Bosnia and Lebanon have shaped Rowe's opinions but he believes his social and political consciousness was awakened in childhood.

Rowe's mother, Sally Thomas, is a Supreme Court judge in Darwin; his father, Edward, was a lawyer. Dinnertime conversations were peppered with references to cases they were working on. Listening to them talk meant from an early age he was aware that rarely are things straight-forward or open to simple solutions.

Additionally, while Darwin may not have a reputation for its arts and culture, Rowe says it was a vibrant, multicultural and egalitarian city with a variety of cultural festivals and events. "If I'd been the son of a Supreme Court judge in Sydney or Melbourne I probably would have lived in a specific neighbourhood and been driven to and from my private school with very little contact with others outside that world. In Darwin, I just walked to the local public school with everyone else."

Rowe left the Northern Territory when he was 17 for drama school in Newcastle, New South Wales. He was soon bored, believing acting lacked a certain rigour. After seeing his first ballet, Rowe signed up for classes, attracted partly by the discipline of dance and, he admits, the fact that most of his fellow students were girls. "I thought anyone could be an actor. I wanted a craft, a skill that was clearly defined.

While I now realise this was a very immature view of acting, dance seemed to offer the discipline I sought. The gender demographics only made it more appealing ..." But from the start, ballet hierarchies did not sit well with Rowe. He did not feel comfortable with the class or cultural statements he thought it made. Looking back, the feeling of "political irrelevancy" he experienced in Finland was perhaps predictable.

After leaving Finland in 1992, Rowe spent three months working as a farmhand in various European countries. In Spain he met a group of North Africans, mainly from Liberia, who endured considerable hardship to get to Europe and then eked out an existence doing arduous minimum wage labouring jobs. "Yet they were always happy and always moving and singing and dancing. They would sing to one another from the treetops where they were picking fruit. I knew I had to get to Africa to see for myself the creativity that bubbled out of there."

The African adventure nearly ended soon after it began. Rowe ended up in a border prison between Mali and Algeria in West Africa for allegedly not having the right passport stamps. Eight hundred kilometres from the nearest town, he feared the guards planned to kill him and take his motorbike.

"No one knew where I was and no one, I suspect, would have missed me for quite some time. I was terrified," he recalls. "One or two of the guards were particularly, let's say, amorous and I had to fight off their nightly advances. Then, after a week, they just let me go and I left with my virtue intact."

Rowe first visited the West Bank city of Ramallah in 1998, naively thinking that while he was in Tel Aviv, a mere 45 minutes away in neighbouring Israel, it would be easy to drop in on dancers he'd met a few months earlier at a festival in Cairo.

Instead he found himself at a military checkpoint, caught between Israeli soldiers firing teargas at rock-throwing young Palestinian men. In an upcoming book, he writes of running across the fray, "waving my Australian passport above my head as though it might radiate neutrality".

Rowe made it into Ramallah, found his friends and spent a week leading a dance workshop which he describes as similar to the many others he taught around the world. But he was intrigued by the creativity of the dancers in the studio and the contrast with the world outside - a world he describes as so shaped by military oppression that the thought of dancing seemed hysterical. Given that he'd been in the Middle East as a guest of the Israeli Ministry of Culture to review a dance festival in Tel Aviv, he says writing about his experiences in Ramallah brought a sharp rebuke when he returned to London.

While the ministry never invited him to write about dance in Israel again, Rowe's colleagues in Ramallah asked him to return and stay longer. He did not expect to be there eight years later but in 2000 met and fell in love with Palestinian dancer Maysoun Rafeedie. The couple are now married and have two young daughters. Thanks partly to his years in Ramallah, Rowe is suspicious of the ways in which Palestinian and Israeli artists are sometimes brought together in a show of unity. He describes it as political propaganda, with the arts used to mask inequalities and the reality of both groups. "It's apartheid, isn't it, when one group can travel home freely and another has to go through military checkpoints and cordons?"

Expressing this view at international dance forums has earned Rowe a degree of notoriety. At the 2003 Dance and the Child International Conference in Brazil, the Israeli delegation walked out midway through his presentation and later, joined by the United States representatives, condemned his speech. Would Rowe hold different opinions if he had spent nearly a decade in Israel dealing with suicide bombings and repeated security threats? He doubts it, saying he worked regularly in Israel before his years in Ramallah and would have found it difficult to ignore the situation in the Occupied Territories.

Rowe's description of the West Bank as being home to creative and vibrant people making extraordinary art is at odds with what the rest of the world sees on television news. He thinks people would be surprised to learn about the creative part of the culture. "All societies are multilayered, even those in the grip of war. Cultural and artistic activities can transcend that and they tend to become very important to people, like those in the Occupied Territories, who are trying to maintain a sense of their own distinct identity." He talks of one night travelling home from a dance class with a group of Palestinian students when they were detained, at gunpoint, at a check-point. Once again, Rowe produced his passport -

"I'd got pretty quick at whipping that out". Australian citizenship spared him but he had to watch while his colleagues were beaten. "Then the soldiers turned to me and told me to f*** off. There was nothing I could do but get on a bus and sit there feeling like ... I thought we'd had this amazing day, I'd been feeling on top of the world but then I realised I was just a dance teacher."

If love kept Rowe in Ramallah longer than he had expected, it ultimately propelled him and Maysoun to Auckland. The couple decided they wanted a safer and freer environment in which to raise daughters Sama, about to turn 4, and Yafa, 15 months.

Political convictions, a sense of solidarity with the community and family may have kept them in Ramallah but Rowe says they decided they could perhaps better serve their community from the outside as advocates, global ambassadors if you like. "We liked New Zealand for political reasons - that you didn't run off and start bombing Iraq when the rest of the world did. I didn't want to pay taxes to a government that was engaged in those wars." He also admired the work of Associate Professor Ralph Buck, head of University of Auckland's dance school, whom he met in Portugal in 2005.

For his part, Buck says Rowe was open, candid and his research interests instantly appealed. "The rigour with which he was going about his research - looking at dance in traumatised communities - appealed to my driving values about the way dance can be used," says Buck. He recalls swimming in the Mediterranean with Rowe who told him that while he could see the ocean from his home in Ramallah, going through checkpoints and cordons made it too difficult to get to. "I just kept thinking, 'why would anyone do what Nicholas is doing - and especially in Palestine?' It was so audacious."

Moving from the University of Otago to Auckland, Buck began pulling together staff for University of Auckland's dance school. He did not immediately think of Rowe as a contender until last year when Rowe contacted him about possible employment opportunities. Buck first had to convince his superiors Rowe would be a sensible choice. He says he has no issue with Rowe's political convictions and that he is open to varying influences, ideas and values. "I have told Nicholas that I have no problems with his views but I have made it clear that he has to remain open to others having their political stance. I do have a problem with anyone or any group not tolerating another point of view.

Have your view, argue your point but accept the right of others to do the same." Rowe is excited about being in Auckland, describing it as a multicultural city with a high degree of harmony among the various groups who live here. He sees it as a model for other international cities. "It is redefining how a society can exist without a dominant group or culture." Given his background combined with his forthright - but politely expressed - opinions, it is likely to be only a matter of time before he makes an impression on Auckland's artistic community through teaching or his work as a writer and film-maker.

Rowe's book, Raising Dust: A History of Dance, Politics and Social Change in Palestine, will be published this year while he hopes a film he made in Ramallah will be accepted for screening at international festivals, including Auckland's. Called The Secret World, the one-hour film is based on William Golding's book The Lord of the Flies.

Rowe became involved in 2005 when a friend teaching at a primary school asked if he could help with their drama production of the book. Not fond of directed school productions - "where kids are pointed on stage and told what to do" - he suggested they get the children together and talk to them about the type of production they wanted to do using The Lord of the Flies as the starting point.

Rather than a stage show, Rowe thought the project would work well as a short film. Twenty-five children participated in a series of workshops and devised a story set in the West Bank about children living without adults in a city behind a wall. Rowe says they chose not to concentrate on the more violent aspects of the society but on more subtle and perhaps more insidious day-to-day humiliations influenced by their own experiences of living under a military regime.

The film was eventually finished, edited and screened in Ramallah late last year. Rowe says unlike The Lord of the Flies, it carried a strong message about the possibility of redemption. "I think The Lord of the Flies has rather a bleak message of humanity that I don't subscribe to," he says.

"I have been into communities and societies where the people have experienced unbelievable trauma and oppression. They are living in conditions, under regimes, which make me think that if I lived there, I'd probably be tempted to shoot myself.

"Yet amongst it all, there are people who have hope and strive for a better and more positive future. I arrive as a dance educator and they greet me enthusiastically and immediately start talking about their plans, what they're aiming to achieve. It gives me an ever-inspiring impression of humanity."