A dancer who has defied the odds talks to MIKE HOULAHAN about a major new production opening in Auckland on Thursday.
Michael Parmenter shouldn't be staging the dance epic Jerusalem. Ten years ago he was diagnosed with cancer and shortly afterwards found out he was HIV-positive. He was given months to live.
Even Parmenter doubted he would perform again. Two years ago he toured an autobiographical solo piece, The Long Undressing, as a full stop to an acclaimed choreographic career.
But the strong 43-year-old has defied everyone - including himself - and continued creating dance works.
"When I made Long Undressing it definitely felt like a swansong," Parmenter says.
"Since then there's been lots of new drug developments which have given me heaps of energy and a strength I never thought that I would ever have. A few years ago I couldn't have conceived of doing a work of this magnitude, but my health situation has changed, thanks to modern medicine."
Parmenter has said one of his responses to HIV has been to create dance works of great beauty - a defiant gesture against an ugly disease.
With Jerusalem - a work on an epic scale, with 14 dancers and seven singers - Parmenter is back and bigger than ever. This work tells a spiritual journey from the evil of Babylon to the majesty of a new Jerusalem, using the words of the Bible, visionary artist William Blake and New Zealand poet James K. Baxter.
"I certainly did need to make a statement to entice me back to do a company work again because I find it very difficult," Parmenter says.
"To get me back into it, it had to be something big. I wasn't prepared to come back just to do another dancey thing."
Parmenter felt earlier Commotion Company works Go and The Race started a series of works which needed a conclusion. For him, those years hadn't been summed up satisfactorily.
"There were lots of reasons to get this company together," Parmenter says.
"I've made a conscious reference to lots of things we've done in the past. I've not at all tried to be innovative and find new things all the time. If there's a section where I've dealt with similar things in the past, I've used those same images."
Parmenter is a choreographer who leaves large parts of his works to his dancers to create - a work under his Commotion Company banner really is made by the company. For Jerusalem, Parmenter was very specific about what he wanted, but at the same time left a lot up to the dancers.
"It's meant the dancers have had to get used to hearing 'No' quite often. We went through one stage of three or four weeks where we all became very dejected, where all I seemed to be saying was, `No, that's not it'," he says.
"The dancers were making these offerings of material, and huge offerings of themselves physically and mentally and I was just saying, 'No, no no', until finally one day I said 'Yes'. We could all see why I said yes, the dancers who were doing the thing said 'Yes' too, and they knew it.
"You think you get a company together and have a great time, but it's always been a painful process for me. For these dancers I think it was quite a difficult process as well. I had a very clear vision of what I wanted, but I was leaving it up to them to find the material sometimes.
"We just had to wait until those two things collided. Eventually they did but it was a long time. It wasn't necessarily conducive to a pleasant working situation at times."
For those and other reasons, Parmenter says he needed dancers he could really trust and feel confident with.
"It [Jerusalem's subject matter] is an area I have certain insecurities about myself," he says. "I needed a group of people I could feel safe with."
Parmenter was brought up in a strict Christian household, making his coming out as a gay man a family trauma. His spiritual side is still very strong, and has heavily influenced the making of Jerusalem.
His childhood peers may have a great deal of difficulty seeing their vision of religion in his work, but it is a spiritual vision nonetheless, Parmenter says.
"I think New Zealanders are concerned with questions of spirituality, but it doesn't necessarily fall into the conservative Christian framework," he says.
"I think in New Zealand ... we are concerned to forge a spiritual identity I think, and that's part of Baxter's contribution. He felt New Zealand would never have a soul if the spiritual vision of both the Maori and European people weren't acknowledged. In some ways this piece is just trying to make some contribution in a small artistic form."
The Gospels according to the Bible, Blake and Baxter are twined together by dance and music to tell several stories of a journey to Jerusalem - both physical and metaphorical.
Putting three such disparate sources together proved easier than Parmenter expected. He and composer David Downes used text from Baxter's poems, psalms and the Song of Solomon from the Bible and extracts of Blake - mostly from his epic poem Jerusalem - to create the narrative and the lyrics for Commotion Company's Jerusalem.
"Once I decided the opening movement would be Babylon, suddenly this image of Babylon kept on coming up everywhere in Baxter's poetry, which I'd never been aware of before," Parmenter says.
It's not entirely coincidental if there's a hint of the millennium in the dance.
As New Zealand enters a new century it is one of the few countries with a living commitment to a multi-cultural society, Parmenter says.
"That's a story which we need to tell. It's not necessarily this story, but it's something we need to remind ourselves of," he says.
With that in mind, Jerusalem is touring New Zealand, and next year Parmenter hopes to tour it internationally.
In the meantime, Parmenter's feet continue dancing in defiance of time. He is creating a new work for the Royal New Zealand Ballet, and he and other leading choreographers Douglas Wright and Shona McCullagh are looking at forming a new fulltime dance company.
Parmenter still has plenty to say, but Jerusalem is the closing of another chapter.
"In some ways it does feel like the definitive statement of what Commotion Company was trying to do," he says.
The beat goes on.
Who: Michael Parmenter
What: Jerusalem
Where: Sky City Theatre
When: Thursday to Sunday
- NZPA
New sentence follows dance star's full stop
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