Promises of Paradise

By BERNADETTE RAE

Talking with the enigmatic Lemi Ponifasio, founder of the Mau dance group, is an Alice in Wonderland-type experience. No white rabbits but the ground keeps moving.

Ponifasio's company Mau is premiering a new work, Paradise, in AK03 - except the ordinary and innocent definitions in that sentence do not apply.

Ponifasio, who is Samoan-born but trained in dance in Japan, Europe and the Pacific, says Mau is more delegation than dance company.

One of Mau's major missions, he explains, is to move around the Pacific, working to develop a united voice for that culturally diverse but internationally silent population. Last year Land was a collaboration between Mau and Kanak people in New Caledonia.

Neither "dance" nor "dance theatre" is an adequate label for the cross-cultural experience Mau delivers.

Previous performances like Lo'omatua, Ava, Umu, Rise and Bone Flute ivi ivi have been sublime, grotesque, disturbing and bathed in a beauty, brutal or sweet, that speaks of a primeval world.

One reviewer spoke of the work as "existential torment", another as "hypnotically beautiful but totally incomprehensible".

Performance seems to be an inadequate word, as well, for something so soul-stirring.

Ponifasio refers to what he does in terms of stimulating a conversation. And he fears that theatre is in danger of losing its relevance in the world as this conversation degrades into mere entertainment.

Mau was in Prague this year for the Prague Quadrennial and Ponifasio was invited to participate in a special event, looking at the future of theatre from a design point of view.

He made a black box lit with a single beam of light and invited people to go inside and contemplate.

"There were no boundaries inside," he says. "That is what I think the theatre should be: a place of limitless imagination. But most people found it really odd, because there was no 'design'."

The new work, Paradise, reflects Ponifasio's continuing meditation on theatre design.

It will spill out of the "black box" - actually the Sky City Theatre - with the first part, a powhiri-like welcome, taking place outside. That is to establish, says Ponifasio, a sense of space, of why people are there, to feel that the audience also has a responsibility in coming into the theatre space.

"Going to the theatre is not like going to the dairy to buy milk."

The performance on stage will be followed by a poroporoaki, or farewell, again outside the theatre.

"We need to bring the ceremony back into the places where people gather," says Ponifasio, "and to reclaim something for the theatre, beyond the commercial aspect, the trade and exchange."

Paradise is destined for Europe after its Auckland season, going to the Venice Biennale in October, followed by a tour of French Polynesia.

"One man's paradise is another man's hell," says Ponifasio.

"The Pacific is marketed around the world as paradise. But if you live there ... the Pacific is also nuclear weapons, epidemics, it's actually a working laboratory for the rest of the planet."

If you live in the South Pacific, paradise might be South Auckland.

"We are all manipulated by promises of paradise. I think it is great that we are performing the work at Sky City. Sky City is a paradise place, for sure."

Performance

* What: Paradise

* Where & when: Sky City Theatre, Sunday to Tuesday, 7.30pm