Neil Ieremia's car smash of a year

After taking a sabbatical, Ieremia and Black Grace are in recovery mode. Picture / Duncan Cole

Just over a year ago, New Zealand's top dance company Black Grace wowed New York audiences in a four-week season at the New Victory Theatre on Broadway.

Fresh from invitation-only performances at Jacob's Pillow Festival in Massachusetts, one of the most prestigious dance events in the world, Black Grace - founded by dancer-choreographer and 2005 Arts Laureate Neil Ieremia in 1995 - appeared to be in fine form.

"Muscular, charming," cooed the New York Times reviewer, before adding, "Mr Ieremia has wit and compelling dancers and should push himself and them to do more."

Little did the reviewer, or anyone else outside Black Grace, know, Ieremia himself was feeling exactly the same way. In a One News interview with Ieremia outside the New York theatre, he seemed flat, dejected. Something was clearly wrong.

Midway through the New York season, he fired the entire touring company of seven male dancers and two guest females. The firing, which Ieremia has never talked about before, came after days of brooding alone and isolated in his hotel room.

"The tour to the United States was very harsh," he recalls. "It was three months on the road and very harsh in terms of my expectations.

"To be invited to perform was a wonderful achievement - these were goals I set really early on in my career but I got there and I felt, here we are, performing in New York, being looked after really well, and I felt empty. I wasn't happy.

"I had reached this summit and I thought, 'Is that it?' Watching the works we had done for so many years and watching them, at times, being done poorly, that really affected me ... I struggle to watch old work that I've made but those works still mean a great deal to me.

"I stopped talking to the company and isolated myself and stayed in the hotel room and only came out when I needed to. It got to a point when I couldn't work with them and they couldn't work with me."

Ieremia, in the middle of the tour which included New Mexico and Hawaii, called a meeting and told his troupe, "'I've had enough of this. I am not going to tolerate this any more' - but I said it in much more plain terms than that. 'We will get through this tour but when we get back to New Zealand, that's it.'

"It was harsh but that's the nature of what we do. We are only as good as the work we do. I test people. I ask them why they are there, 'why are you on my stage and why are you doing it the same way you did it two years ago, five years ago?'

"I told them these are the areas where the technique is deficient - please address these. After years of doing that, and looking at the same thing, something's got to give."

The dancers, some of whom had been working with Ieremia for years, were stunned. "They were gobsmacked and horrified," Ieremia, 36, confesses. "I felt justified in doing it. However, after I'd cooled off, someone said to me, 'Neil, that was really rough, the way you treated people.'

"I listened to what they said and then I called a company meeting in Hawaii a couple of weeks later. I took an hour to go through things and apologise to every single person humbly and unconditionally - not to take back our working relationship but to say the way I behaved was wrong.

"I've written letters to every single person but I haven't heard anything from anybody. There has been a huge silence. People left before I got back to New Zealand so I walked back into a company with two dancers."

All efforts made by the Herald to get the dancers' side of the story have been unsuccessful. None want to talk about what happened; no one, we were told, wants to open "that can of worms". One source said there was still a lot of bitterness, and sadness, and the dancers were trying to move on with their lives.

Having gutted his own dance company, worse was to come for Ieremia, on a more personal level. Amid allegations of infidelity, which Ieremia doesn't deny but won't discuss because of concerns for his children Isabel, 8, and 18-month-old Isaac, his marriage to Black Grace general manager Jessica Smith fell apart. He moved out of the family home early this year and is now, he says, "living on my own ... not choosing anyone at the moment".

Always strongly identified as an all-male dance troupe, some people in the dance community say the rot set in when Ieremia allowed female dancers into the group a couple of years ago.

"I would have to say there was definitely a dynamic shift with the introduction of females into Black Grace," he emails a day after our interview. "Like anything, there were both positive and negative impacts but what the overall impact was, I'm still not sure. But to focus on them specifically would be over-simplifying things."

He blames himself for the breakup, pointing out there were many days when he would work for more than 12 hours. "When it comes to my art, it's what I wake up for and I lost sight of the other things in life, like my children. I would see the kids in the morning before I went to work and it got a bit rough.

"I take responsibility for my past, it is just really sad. I have been really upset about it for a long time. Which is why when I hear a lot of people talking about things they know very little about, it hurts me even more.

"People don't want to stick around during the dark times and this has been the darkest period of my life."

Ieremia brightens when he relates that he now, ironically, spends more time with his children.

"They come and stay with me over weekends, I make them dinner, and I see them every morning if I am not required early at work and I make time now. They are the most important thing to me now and there is no compromise."

Last year's meltdown is not the end of Black Grace, although many thought it would be.

The company staged its annual Black Grace and Friends show in April, but Ieremia was nowhere to be seen and the mood was tinged with melancholy.

After taking a three-month sabbatical and dealing with what he calls "longstanding issues with my employment contract", Ieremia and Black Grace are in recovery mode. A new board has been appointed, and a three-year strategic plan has been forged, with a new work being created for AK07, the Auckland arts festival. Creative New Zealand's 2007 funding round has assigned $375,000 to Black Grace.

But his selection of dancers to work with the company next year is a paradox, given how Black Grace started out in the first place. "I am committed to this all-male thing," he says. "It's always been my thing and the males I've worked with in the past were all fantastic but the majority of them were over 30, 35, and the work becomes more physically demanding.

"We've had to do some succession planning and we went on a national audition circuit. We got close to 100 people. I was looking for four men and two women. I've ended up with 12 women, and one male, maybe one other."

That's quite a shift, Ieremia agrees, but adds, "There aren't that many male dancers coming through the schools so there is a real shortage of males at the ready-to-employ level."

Regardless of the gender balance, Ieremia acknowledges his managerial style will need addressing. "I've always been a polite person for years of working with the same people - but we get to know each other and both parties take liberties. I am a straight talker.

"I went through a phase when I would roar every now and then but one of the turning points in my life was when my father sat down with me and my whole family and watched the Black Grace documentary [which screened on TV One last year].

"There was a section when I yell at the company and my father was so, so upset with me and said, 'I don't understand why you have to do that.'

"At the time it fell on deaf ears. I felt momentary pain and embarrassment but it didn't last.

"But then I've had a lot of time recently to pick over what I call this car accident - it's like a car smash and I am forced to walk past it every single day and look at the carnage."

Ieremia says he had to face up to his parents and family "when everything blew up".

"One of the most difficult things for me was to tell them what had happened and my part in what had happened. My mother cried. The kids have saved me during this period, and my parents.

"I was in pretty deep trouble emotionally and mentally during this period. It's been a brutal year but I am alive [Ieremia suffered from rheumatic fever when he was a child, which has affected his heart's aortic valve], I have my children and I still get to make work. Everyone has rallied around to keep Black Grace on track.

"I think a lot of what people have said out there lately is that I am an extremely unreasonable person when it comes to working with people.

"I used to be a fantastic leader and towards the end of last year, perhaps before then, I made some mistakes and bad choices, did some things I shouldn't have ... working the hours I worked and applying that same pressure to the people that worked with me."