Douglas Wright: Ghost Dance

Reviewed by BERNADETTE RAE

The first time I saw Douglas Wright dance was in the late 80s, in Faun Variations, a solo created with more than a nod to Nijinsky. It could have been high pretension on Wright's part.

Instead he danced with such single-minded passion and transcendent ability that time stood still, I couldn't breathe and to this day I still regard his claims to have been born in Tuakau in 1956, the son of an outworker and "a lineman for the county" with suspicion.

A reincarnation of the great Nijinsky, a foundling faun, a beautiful imposter from Planet Chameleon all seem much more likely.

The huge works that followed, Faun Variations, and now his riveting autobiography, only confirm, for me that first blinding impression of Wright as a being, a talent and an intelligence way outside the norm.

Ghost Dance is a flaming autobiography with a difference, and with a structure that follows no logic apart from that created by Wright's recollections. Its first strangeness is the early chapter on childhood describing not Wright's own growing up but that of his true love, true friend and fellow artist, in obscurity, the late Malcolm Ross.

Wright offers an explanation for this: " ... as I looked out over the landscape of my personal history, I found that wherever I directed my attention, something was blocking the view. At first I thought there was a mote of dust in my eye, a black spot, or one of those visual disturbances that can signal the onset of cataracts or blindness, but then I realised it was a person, someone I knew standing there, and after several failed attempts to go around or simply ignore him, I finally realised the only way to my past was through his."

This relationship, and others of significance, most notably his 20-year close friendship with Janet Frame, are the bones of the autobiography, its human substance.

Wright's life experiences drape from these bones, in a mostly dark display.

Growing up gay and with a primal urge to dance was not easy in rural New Zealand. A successful gymnastics career offered a brief period of respite from his father's discontent before the barely adolescent Wright was discovering the physical realities of homosexuality in the public toilets en route to training, then going on to explore drugs, alcohol and sex with the same excesses of energy he soon came to pour into dance.

Despite "starting late" he rose through the ranks of contemporary dance like a meteorite, becoming a member of Limbs after just two years of training and winning the single available place in New York's Paul Taylor Dance at an open audition, despite not quite making the height requirement.

(When Paul Taylor stood in front of Wright during the three-day audition process, and said, "You're not 5 foot 8, are you?" Wright eyeballed him and replied, "I dance 5 foot 8.")

He later also performed with London's prestigious DV8 Physical Theatre.

His years with Taylor coincided with a thorough exploration of the Manhattan gay bath-house phenomenon of the 80s. Wright's graphic, insider's description of this world, where the threat of Aids was a mere whisper, malignant but easy to disregard, may shock the innocent heterosexual reader. So will his disclosure of his frenzied state of mind and his constant abuse of his body at this time, through every available excess.

There was his breakdown, his return to New Zealand, a huge detox, the diagnosis of HIV - and a glory time for New Zealand contemporary dance as he created another dozen full-length works, before his energy and inhuman persistence began to fail.

Anyone familiar with Wright's choreographic style will recognise him through his writing, highly visual, brilliant and evocative, articulating in words now, instead of flying bodies, his exploration of difficult concepts and worlds just beyond our usual vision.

* Penguin, $39.95