Small and precious movements

Miniatures is performed in a series of small environments.

Malia Johnston, dancer, choreographer and one-third of new contemporary dance company Outlaw Creative, has lots of ideas. In Miniatures, which kicks off its national tour in Auckland this week, she captures a collection of those ideas in a series of small pieces of dance. The show is performed by a cast of seven in a series of small environments and interestingly constricted spaces.

Johnston had just returned from a European sojourn when she began making the piece in 2004. Fresh in her mind was the time she had just spent in galleries and exhibitions in Spain, observing the way artists like Picasso and Dali deconstructed one another's work, and made references back and forth.

As she worked, another idea grew - that small things are precious things, often vulnerable so treated in a special way, placed up high away from danger, encased protectively.

A set evolved - three body-sized boxes, six little boxes just big enough to stand on and one 2m high cupboard - and finally there were 24 separate segments of dance that move in and around and through, contained, elevated, bound and balanced on these physical blocks of space.

"The ideas at the beginning were all quite separate," says Johnston. "In the last week I pieced them together to make one work, and of course they are linked by the dancers, the costumes, the music."

Miniatures was first performed in Auckland last year. For this second season, in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, there is a new ending but few other changes. The dancers - Sarah Sproull, Liana Yew, Maria Dabroska, Jacob Sullivan, Julia Milsom, Paul Young and Johnston herself - were chosen for being "very different people, individuals with unique qualities".

There is an original score by Eden Mulholland and costumes by Asho Gevorgyan add to the "antique-y feeling, the sepia hue".

Johnston was a 1998 graduate of the Unitec dance programme and one of the founders of the experimental Graduates Dance Company. She has also worked with Curve Dance Collective and the mixed ability company Touch Compass.

She first worked with Guy Ryan, now a partner in Outlaw Creative as well as her boyfriend, in 2001. (The third Outlaw partner is producer Michele Powles.) Their first collaboration was Fracture/Weather Vain People, an eight-month project that left them exhausted and depressed at the ratio of work completed to audience achieved.

In reaction, they created Drift, a "contemporary cabaret" with a cast of five and props and costumes rummaged up entirely from secondhand shops. They crammed the whole lot, after about two weeks of crazy creativity and rehearsal, into a van and set off for the Coromandel.

The show was a screaming success, with no marketing beyond chalked messages on township footpaths, and very few expenses. They got audiences of 40 in Coromandel township, just six in Thames. They also presented Drift at the Bethells Surf Club and at the Wellington Fringe Festival.

That experience, and their observations of a lively dance scene throughout Europe, where audiences "go to everything, from big funded productions to tiny self-funded shows in venues that provide 10 seats", shifted their perspectives.

"You don't have to make things in a big theatre all the time," says Johnston. "The ideas are just as important. And the ideas being done here stand up to anything we saw in Europe."

Their next work was Terrain, also first performed last year, and designed for intimate spaces and an audience of just 30, placed close to the small raised stage.

Terrain is also on tour from July 2005, to Taranaki, Christchurch and Nelson. Somehow Johnston will also fit in her role as choreographer for the Wearable Arts Award in Wellington, later this year.

* Miniatures is at Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber June 23-25