Black Grace - men behaving gracefully

Neil Ieremia

"I think dance has the potential to be really obscure and pretentious at times," said Black Grace dance director/choreographer Neil Ieremia on the eve of his troupe's New York City debut last week. "And I'm not too interested in that myself."

Ieremia, who didn't start dancing until age 19, was ready to shake things up. Give people a really good knock, as he called it.

Well, consider the knock received. After the lights stopped flickering and heart rates returned to normal, Broadway's New Victory Theatre pulsed with the aura of something new - at least for Americans.

Ieremia's compelling mixture of Samoan war dances and cheeky surrealism wowed the audience into a two-minute standing ovation late last month.

In a city that prides itself on dance tradition, Ieremia's show - imported from a summer tour through the Berkshires - proved just the thing to keep them from sleeping through another safe rehash of what's come before.

Decked out in thin pants and sporting the kinds of thickly muscled torsos one sees more often on the rugby field, Black Grace's all-male troop of seven practically drummed a fierce happy tattoo on to the thickest of skins, as one local critic put it.

The night opened with a fierce and challenging haka, in which the dancers chant, hiss, wheeze and slap in unison in a captivating rendition of a traditional Samoan war dance.

Eyebrows waggling, eyes-popping, the dancers crouch and seethe and clap like a hissing snake.

"We want to welcome our audiences," warned Ieremia in his studio beforehand. "But we also challenge them - we don't challenge them in a horrible way, but in that we are offering our work and our experience and our history and our cultures."

The audiences loved it, and the momentum seemed to carry through the evening's remaining numbers, which Ieremia had selected from more than a decade of performances.

Each piece introduced and then improvised on a new movement, often playfully. In Faa Ulutao, the men galloped across stage on all fours, heads nodding in syncopation.

In Minoi, Sam Fuataga, Sean MacDonald, Tamihana Paurini and several others slap-danced, counted and sang their way through a three-count round, their arms gracefully moving in unison.

This mixture of fierceness and sweetness, of laughter and aggression gave Black Grace a constantly engaging quality. The deeper one watched into the show, the more Ieremia would do to challenge the audience.

At the end of Deep Far, a piece on the cyclical nature of weather patterns, four dancers fold into an astonishingly beautiful weave of limbs and bodies - a formation so elegant it resembled sculpture.

"I push them very hard," said Ieremia. "I even made one of these huge guys cry."

Whether it was fear or joy or both, the dancers were in fine form, especially Sam Fuataga, who did everything from leading the opening haka to bursting into an inspired rendition of Drive by Bic Runga in Human Language, a piece which also involved a line of men blowing up balloons as they watch two female guest dancers walk by. As they walk off stage the men's balloons deflate.

The women, Abby Crowther and Desiree Westerlund also made a duet appearance in Open Letter, a sometimes brutal, sometimes funny riff on the nature of communication. In a series of jerky movements they smashed and crashed into one another, hair falling shaggy over their faces.

The most popular piece of the evening though was Pause, the concluding number in which Fuataga, MacDonald, Paurini, and four other dancers sprinted around the stage in leaping and flowing motions to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto.

"I think it's just hilarious," said Ieremia, "having a bunch of black guys running around to Bach."

Many of Ieremia's pieces seemed designed for that purpose - amusement, but the spirit shines through and proves catching. A slow giggle spread during Pause.

The pieces also seemed tailormade to dramatise the elevation of athleticism into art.

"New Zealand is a very young country for dance," said Ieremia. "You either play rugby, or play sport, or you follow the academic path."

Black Grace has rescued many of its core performers from this boring dichotomy. MacDonald actually grew up with Ieremia, sitting in the back of their classrooms complaining about school work.

"My parents were always supportive though of what I wanted to do," says Ieremia. "I even convinced them to put a second mortgage on their house. Even during years when I was just saying why, why why?"

But if New York was an ultimate goal, there will be no rest. After Black Grace finishes up here, the troupe will tour their way home via Mexico and several other stops.

"I think when we first started travelling people looked at us as something exotic, something from a different part of the world. As if we were a cultural performance troupe."

Though that doesn't seem to be a problem after the reviews that Black Grace received in New York.

* John Freeman is a writer back in New York.