By BERNADETTE RAE
The silhouette of the building looms mysteriously out of the dark, with only the faintest, flickering light outlining the doorway. An eerie rumble of monochromatic sound, which could be arising from the underworld itself, beckons the visitor relentlessly in.
She sensibly reminds herself that this is gentle and gentrified Ponsonby on a mild Monday night - and a dance rehearsal, not a communion with the dead.
But the floor inside the building is not solid. It moves and crunches underfoot, and in the interior gloom dark shadows twist and writhe between the paltry beacons of two small lamps. The smell of kerosene hangs in the air.
Lemi Ponifasio, chief shaman of Mau Dance, senses a new body has joined his troupe and emerges darkly from the gloom.
"I have been looking out for you. Come and we will talk."
Across the "stage," where a tribe of dancers continues to slice at the thick air with spear-like poles, another door opens into a more familiar reality. A toilet cistern flushes loudly and the tang of live locker room hits the nostrils just before we emerge into a regular gym.
"The Sheds" in John St, like aeroplane hangars with a tract of sawdust floor, are part of St Paul's College.
"I learned to play rugby here," says Ponifasio, an old boy of the school. "And to smoke."
Now he is rehearsing his dancers for a new performance, Boneflute Ivi Ivi, at the Maidment Theatre for a three-night season from Wednesday. But "rehearse" is not a word that Ponifasio would use. "Choreograph" is another redundant verb. And Ponifasio has given up teaching.
"People came expecting to learn a technique or find out some secret. Dancers with that mind-set, expecting to work that way, just got frustrated.
"Mau means 'testament of the body.' That is what I am interested in: the experiential body and the body expressing its own life. The body has its own consciousness, outside the mind, outside the ego. So I don't teach people things or 'make' new shows.
"My friends join me and we train together and I wait for my friends and my dancers to bring me something. They make something for me."
You can train a monkey to do anything, he adds, with some vehemence and scorn for the regular way of creating a performance piece - and indeed for training dancers.
"Dance schools treat the body as an object and, like all technology, are expert at slowly killing the body," he says.
Ponifasio grew up in Samoa, "where everybody dances and performs in the schools, the churches and villages and where dance has its place in life - not just as a show."
At age 15 he arrived in Auckland, when disco was king.
Ponifasio was a natural mover - and competitive. He was told he should take some ballet classes if he wanted to be John Travolta. So on the first possible Saturday morning he hiked up to a studio in Karangahape Rd, decked out in his best tracksuit.
"The room was full of women in funny-looking clothes and there were four gay guys in the back row," he says. "Swan Lake? I didn't even know what a swan was. When it was over I just ran and ran.
"It was two years before I went back, but that first time had a huge influence on my thinking about dance that came from France, through Italy and China and all the way to Karangahape Rd and this Samoan boy.
"I could do those movements, but my body was telling me about my history and my movements."
Ponisfasio studied contemporary dance as well as ballet, and Butoh in Japan. He found most sense in Butoh's attempt to examine the nature of the body, the spirit of the body - and "how to get my body back."
But even Butoh got caught in the performance ethic, he says, and became "a show."
The Butoh influence is still visible in Mau, but less, these days, than Ponifasio's Pacific heritage, its rituals, stories and ancestral tales.
Ponifasio has lived back in New Zealand for the last three years - "at home in Pt Chev" - and describes his dance as "the casting of the fisherman's net into the ocean, and the trawling up of the sediment of life."
Boneflute Ivi Ivi began with an idea gleaned from author Albert Wendt, "inside me the dead woven into my flesh like the music of bone flutes ..."
Then Ponifasio made a theatre date, gathered his friends and headed off for the rugby shed at St Paul's.
"I did look for Pulotu [the Samoan underworld] in this special place in Samoa and I couldn't find it," he says. "I think that the place of the dead is the body itself."
So there in the sawdust and the dark, Ponifasio has spent five weeks "luring the dancers into forgetting their determination to perform, to make their bodies open, silent and sensitive, so the dance can be born."
We work extremely hard," he says. And the fact that the last half hour of Boneflute will not be worked on at all until tomorrow night, will probably guarantee his prediction of experiencing "both terror and ecstasy when we finally come on to the stage."
* Boneflute Ivi Ivi is at the Maidment Theatre from Wednesday night until Friday.
Secrets of shaman of the dance
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