Ballet to a Split Enz beat

TIM FINN describes his reactions to the Royal New Zealand Ballet's production Ihi Frenzy, based on Split Enz songs.

Word came via Mike Chunn (he of the immense, bottom-endlessly crunching bass) that the Royal New Zealand Ballet wanted to have a go at the Enz.

Mark Baldwin (who was at Elam Art School in Auckland around the same time as Judd, Crombie, Gillies et al, and who had seen an early Enz show or two) was to choreograph songs of his choice and take it on the road.

My protective instincts aroused, I decided to keep a loose eye on things. And, so, the communication began. Next minute I was in Wellington, watching the powerful bodies move in rhyme to the old, familiar rhythms.

The first thing I noticed was that they were not dancing "along." The beats and bits of tunes were a lattice-work through which the dancers moved. There was transparency and light. At times I wanted them to catch a big fat backbeat and instead they rode the subliminal, the implied.

My singer's brain struggled but then they were into Shark Attack, the four women clustered around the hapless male, prayer hands pointing downward in sinful stillness, the very moment before his oblivion. "Alien," said Mark Baldwin, and I was caught.

Early Enz drew from a range of references and came up with something of their own. I have begun singing 129/Matinee Idyll again.

Given that we had yet to experience an encore and were desperate to be loved at the time these words were written, I am now able to enjoy the shallow cynicism of: "The whole thing reeks of cheap striptease ... there's nothing more dull than a curtain call."

But that contradiction was thematic for the Enz. The inbuilt opposite always strived against itself. Gravity and the Dancer. And now a show that shows our tension of opposites.

National kapa haka champions Te Matarae I Orehu and the Royal New Zealand Ballet. "We'll take the stage, it's now or never."

Our Dad still moves with panache out on the floor. His love of swing and the graceful dancing he did with our mother were twin pillars of our imaginings.

I learned to dance watching him, then forgot it all in the awkwardness of 12 till 21, learning it again in Split Enz, allowing the music to take me over and never thinking about it. Mark Baldwin has created in his less obvious choices of songs and movement a dance link to those unselfconscious days.

I am, of course, more excited by the one I wrote this morning than the ones I wrote yesterday.

But lest we inhabit a culture of forgetting, great writers falling out of print (Sargeson, Ronald Hugh Morrieson), forever groping for the light switches to our imagined futures in the dimming fears of our present, allowing the past no power, no presence, we gather on the night, the two people rubbing up against each other, whether blood be shed or truth be said, we all may be led from the here and now to whatever is next - or something like that.

* Ihi Frenzy, by the Royal New Zealand Ballet and Te Matarae I Orehu, at the Aotea Centre, Auckland, from June 27.