Encouraging a cultural revolution with dance

Julia Milsom began the creation of her first major dance work ()Scape - an exploration of the impingement of culture on personal identity - by gathering six performers with different backgrounds.

There are four dancers - Paul Young, Kaitahu and pakeha; Min Kyoung Lee, a Korean transplanted six years ago; Kerryn McMurdo, whose birth mother was Italian; and Julie van Renen, French and South African.

Actor Trygve Wakenshaw has a Norwegian background and percussionist Chris O'Connor is of Irish and English descent.

Milsom claims Dutch, Scottish and English ancestry.

"New Zealand culture has such diversity," she says , "and we work around one another in interesting ways.

"We are such a young country, without the depth of history and tradition of, say, Europe. We map our history from all these other countries. Especially for pakeha there is a sense of immaturity of cultural identity - at least to us, all still in our 20s."

Milsom has titled her characters The Outsider, The Weaver, The Gardener, The Leaver, The Stealer and The Agent.

Young, whose family has had a Pakeha/Maori relationship in it for several generations, in which the Pakeha side dominated and was even racist against its Maori element, is The Outsider. He's uncomfortable in his position as Pakeha, feeling unable to find a way into his Maori heritage.

Van Renen is The Gardener, sewing new ideas in other people's minds. She's either nurturing or destroying and desperately cultivating her environment at any cost.

McMurdo is The Leaver, the adopted one, forever searching and never finding; flitting in and out of situations, escaping and avoiding.

Min Kyoung Lee, who sees Korean culture, when there, through Kiwi eyes, and Kiwi sensibility through Korean eyes, is The Weaver, the wise person who integrates and blends.

Wakenshaw is The Stealer, who appropriates things from other cultures and builds, never quite getting it comfortable and right.

Musician Knox is The Agent, the catalyst, the traveller who has come to stay.

The work is also a collaboration between Milsom and partner Andrew McMillan, composer and sound designer, whose electronic creation forms a musical background, an outer world, while percussionist O'Connor provides themes from the inner world of the characters as they move across the broader soundscape.

The work is titled ( )Scape, alluding to dreamscape, landscape and sheer escape, says Milsom.

Dance is dreamlike, in that it provides images that don't always make logical sense but are intriguing and satisfying and hold recognisable meaning, she says.

Dance also creates landscapes, and is about bodies moving through space and using the available environment. And it is about travelling and shifting, moving from here to there, whether that is in a physical sense or in the way you think.

It has been a busy year for Milsom, just two years out from graduation with a dance degree from Auckland's Unitec. She has created two short pieces for Late Night Choreographers - one of which, Emporium, was performed twice in the windows of retailer Buana Satu in Karangahape Rd - and which she is now taking to the Fringe Festival in Wellington.

She has completed her first dance film, Framed, which debuts alongside ()Scape.

Describing ()Scape as her "first attempt at something big" Milsom has driven the project from whoa to go, obtaining initial funding from Arts Alive, with support for venue hire from The Edge's Stamp.

She raised another $5000 in sponsorship and several deals in kind, for printing and opening night wine.

While more seasoned choreographers bemoan the stresses of organising both business and creative sides of a project, Milsom has enjoyed the financial negotiations, and the discovery that business is more about people than just money.

Later this year she hopes to attend the four-week festival Impulse Tanz in Vienna, and will take up a nine-month apprenticeship offered to her by Amsterdam-based collective Magpie, two years ago. "The first year it was too late for me to get there," she says. "The second year Andrew had an accident which damaged his spine."

McMillan is now a tetraplegic, although there is hope for his recovery.

A saxophonist, he would dearly love to recover the use of his fingers.

Milsom is his official carer at night, which provides her with an income while leaving her days free for dance.


Performance

* What: ()Scape
* Where and when: Herald Theatre, Feb 1-4, 8pm