What it takes to be a winner

Neil Ieremia (centre) with performers from Urban Youth Movement. Photo / Black Grace

Every year since 1998, Black Grace Dance Company artistic director Neil Ieremia has produced an extraordinary new work, created and performed by a company of kids plucked straight from the city's high schools, technical colleges, occasionally from a dance course and sometimes off the street.

A combination of boot camp and intensive mentoring on the facts of life as Ieremia sees it has produced one fantastic Urban Youth Movement dance event after another: high-octane energy, intensely physical, emotionally charged - and technically impressive.

This year's version is titled Who Are You? Ieremia has noticed a big change in kids' attitudes over the last decade and blames the phenomena of "getting a certificate for coming last" for cheating kids of the lessons learned from honest competition, and the elation that comes from really winning.

"I challenged these ones by telling them, 'I've read about you; you drink, you smash up cars and just buy another one, you want everything right now, you want to be at the front immediately,"' he says.

From the sounds ricocheting from the Black Grace studio one hot February afternoon, it seems certain that the show this year will at least match its predecessors.

A dozen young people and a handful of regular Black Grace dancers make up the cast of 16, and the noise is coming from their regular rehearsal warm-up: an exceptionally fast and furious game of tag.

The focus of the game is a bunched up sock, wound tight in tape, that has apparently survived five years of being hurled like this from one leaping, thumping, darting dancer to another.

Players are banished to the sideline when tagged but can be rescued. No one seems to be still for more than a second or two. There are screams of excitement.

The game is obviously approached in the spirit of Ieremia's rules for dance and life: give it 100 per cent effort, play to win, take responsibility and "dig deep" in all these endeavours.

"It's great fun," he says. "They love it. It is also a fantastic exercise for moving quickly through space, making quick decisions, physical adjustments, balances and for keeping yourself safe and looking out for others. It's a terrific exercise in spatial awareness."

Rehearsal proper begins about 30 minutes later, with a run-though of the "girls' dance", a parody of the way magazines portray young women to young women themselves and to the male population.

The bikini-clad girl on the cover of the technical magazine is still an examinable social cliche.

A poem written by a previous UYM performer - a naively heart-felt anthem from a young man's testosterone driven dreams - gives plenty of material for the company's male dancers to slouch and wink, pick and choose, use and discard.

The initial reading of the poem raised the girls' hackles instantly, says Ieremia, and led to one of the company's long and deep discussions.

It is the hours spent in this sort of examination of social issues, and the young people's responses, that has always fuelled UYM works.

"Discussions go on for ages," says Ieremia. "But it is great. I don't think young people talk like this with their parents."

Family violence, binge drinking and text bullying have all come under the UYM microscope this season, and Who Are You? includes an almost too realistic fight scene.

Honest discussion of these sorts of issues can be life-changing for the young people, Ieremia says.

"I am not a psychologist or a counsellor but I have had a lot of experience with people and groups, and I trust my instincts and I'm guided by the sort of input I would like for my own children." He says he is quick to spot whether discussions are getting "too heavy" and if someone needs to be referred to expert care.

"We really need these long sessions to get the work out. We go deeply into an issue and then put it into movement. It is hard. It exhausts them. But they are committed."

Seventeen-year-old Chris Ofanoa, a year 13 student at Massey High School and a hip-hop dancer, is in UYM for the second time this year.

"Last year my school dance teacher encouraged me to audition," he says. "It was such a great experience I am back this year. It is challenging but you learn heaps.

"You learn here that if you want something then you have to go for it as hard as you can. At school they just ... tell you to do it. Here, we do it ourselves."

Lucy Lynch is 20 and a dance programme student at Unitec, who worked with Ieremia for Unitec's end-of-year show last year.

"The change I went through during that was amazing," she says. "I just got so much more motivated, determined and focused.

"That was my main reason to do UYM this year - to carry that on and see where it takes me."

Auckland Arts Festival

What: Who Are You - Black Grace presents Urban Youth Movement NZ

Where and when: Musgrove Studio, Maidment Theatre, March 2-5; Playhouse Theatre, Glen Eden, March 8-10; Mangere Arts Centre, March 16-19