Grace comes to the rugby field

By BERNADETTE RAE

It was out of the studio and into the mud for the boys of the Black Grace Dance Company when they began rehearsals for their latest production, Our Back Yard.

The centrepiece of the programme is New Religion, a new work by artistic director Neil Ieremia which marries pure dance with elements of theatre - and it's all about rugby.

To make sure his dancers understood the raw emotions of the game, he took them down to Nixon Park, in Ponsonby, at the beginning of rehearsals for two weeks of what Ieremia politely calls "a most interesting workshop."

The dancers began with a game or two of touch but Ieremia wanted them to feel the primal energy of the dogged, mud-splattered combatants on the field: the bursting lungs, the brutality of another thumping tackle when you are at the point of exhaustion, and then the lift and the determination to fight back.

He confesses he encouraged some of the older guys who have joined the company for this production, namely the beefy Bruce Hopkins and Geoff Dolan, who have strong rugby connections, to give the others "a bit of a niggle."

"And they found out about winning, all right," Ieremia says with a wide grin.

Even the most elegant dancers, such as Tai Royal and Tane Mete, reacted with pure testosterone, popping up after long seconds with their faces held judiciously in the mud with just a single aim - to kill.

New Religion, even in rehearsal, packs a powerful punch.

"The idea started in my mind a few years ago when images started jumping out at me from the sports pages. My first thoughts were not, 'What great rugby photos' but 'What great dance shots,'" says Ieremia.

"They showed bodies in amazing flight ... bodies in amazing positions of power and movement - with nothing touching the ground. I was inspired by the beauty of that accidental choreography."

So Ieremia kept collecting the photos, reading the biographies of the rugby greats and following the fortunes of Alama Ieremia, the famous rugby player in his own family.

On a study tour through Samoa, Hawaii, London, Brussels, New York and Singapore, he discovered just how strongly the rest of the world identified New Zealand with rugby. And he was amazed at the nation's turncoat reaction to the All Blacks losing the World Cup.

It all reinforced his conclusion that rugby in New Zealand is definitely much more than just a game.

Bruce Hopkins has a largely theatrical role in New Religion as the consummate spectator participating in the 2 am sacrament of an international test from an armchair in his living room, and he even gets to recite Shakespearean sonnets. But realities tend to blur in the heat of the big game, and he joins in enough of the dance action to raise a good sweat.

Actors Dolan and Oscar Kightley play a couple of well-versed commentators on the sideline.

"It's stunning," says Hopkins, a veteran of both rugby (captain of the Otago Metropolitan under-20s rep side in his first year at university) and dance. "Rugby to Mozart! And nothing like Foreskin's Lament, which I did last year.

"It captures the sport of rugby perfectly but it is full-on dance, too. Neil's movement style has a quiet power, then every now and then it will just flash. There's this contrast of full-on pace and moments of almost luxurious control."

Hopkins danced with Black Grace on their national tour in 1998. The experience, he says, "blew my body apart. I had to take anti-inflammatories for six weeks just to get through!"

The piece that reduced him to such agony, In Moving Memory, has been reworked for the Back Yard programme. Although it went on tour it has not been performed in Auckland before. Deep Far, originally commissioned by the Royal New Zealand Ballet, also gets another outing.

The second new work in the show is Creek Boys.

"It's about Cannons Creek, down in Porirua, where I grew up, had my first kiss and my first fight, and where I made my first dance - about Jesus, for the local church youth group. We were always known as the Creek Boys," says Ieremia.

"It was a great place to grow up, shrouded in deprivation and other bad stuff - from the outside. Inside there were really strong family and community bonds and a strong culture. Creek Boys is about all that."

And "all that" includes Ieremia's English teacher in the seventh form, who asked the class if they had started reading King Lear yet and then told them not to bother because they were all going to fail anyway.

"That woman devastated us more than she ever knew - more than we ever knew," says Ieremia. "I will never forget that woman. She pops into my mind whenever I am feeling really good."

* Our Back Yard, performed by the Black Grace Dance Company, opens at Auckland's Maidment Theatre on Wednesday.