Tattoo meets tutu in Ihi FrENZy

By BERNADETTE RAE

It couldn't be a wilder combination: classical ballet meets the music of New Zealand's most-loved rock band, Split Enz ... kapa haka meets the proscenium arch ... raupo poi meets pointe shoe ... and tattoo - as in bold, buttock-emblazoned spiral - meets tutu.

The Meridian Energy Season of Ihi FrENZy is a new movement in New Zealand dance, combining the talents of the Royal New Zealand Ballet and Te Matarae I Orehu, the country's leading kapa haka group.

While the recipe might read a little strangely, the finished product promises to be a passionately shared celebration of what it means to be a Kiwi - and to dance.

Te Matarae I Orehu are the current champions of the Aotearoa Traditional Maori Performing Arts Festival, choreographed and led by Wetini Mitai-Ngatai and Taini Morrison, from the legendary Morrison family of entertainers. The group's members, a predominantly youthful crew, are affiliated to the Ngati Rongomai, Ngati Hinekura and Te Arawa tribes of Rotorua.

Their performance forms the first section, Ihi - meaning literally to charge up the atmosphere - of the programme.

Mark Baldwin has choreographed the witty and wild, but still absolutely classical, work FrENZy, which occupies the second half.

Baldwin was born in Fiji to a Fijian mother and an Irish father.

"But I was brought up here so I understand something about this place," he says. "I am a New Zealander."

In the early 70s, when Split Enz were giving their first concerts, Baldwin was at the Elam School of Fine Arts - just a year or two behind Split Enz members Noel Crombie and Phil Judd. His study grant was also funding daily ballet classes at Russell Kerr's Dance Centre, just across the road.

Baldwin was one of the founders of Limbs Dance Company, joined the Royal New Zealand Ballet on graduation and then the Australian Dance Theatre. But he really made his mark as a dancer during a 12-year stint with Rambert Dance Company.

He left Rambert in 1993 and formed the Mark Baldwin Dance Company to further his choreographic ideas. Today his work is seen internationally in the repertoire of such companies as the Royal Ballet, Rambert Dance Company, the Berlin State Opera House, London City Ballet, Turkish State Opera House, the Modern Dance Company of Argentine, the Scottish Ballet, Phoenix Dance Company and Dhagdha Dance Company, in Ireland.

He confesses to a few sleepless nights and worry about the prospect of choreographing a work to music by Split Enz.

"Music is always my inspiration," he says. "But I specialise in working with the contemporary music of living composers and performing with live music."

His company consists of seven dancers and 21 musicians and if recorded music has been required it has previously been more like Stravinsky than Split Enz.

"I love Split Enz and I was there at their first concerts," he says, "but I am a bit of a musical snob professionally."

However, he approached the project as he would any other, asked Tim Finn for some input into the choice of tracks, and then questioned him closely about why individual songs were written, and for whom, and what the band members were feeling and thinking about at the time.

The information so gleaned informs the finished work far more than any attempt to recreate the original performance style, although a recent recording of Split Enz songs by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra was rejected in favour of the genuine article.

The tracks used in FrENZy include some very early songs, - Poor Boy, for example, written six years before any glimmer of fame arrived, by a young Tim Finn who was working in a factory at the time, and could only dream about a successful musical career. Nobody Takes Me Seriously comes from the same factory-work years, but translates into a stunning solo for a male dancer, in the grips of passionate fantasy.

In sharp contrast is the penultimate piece, for three languid girls, called Matinee Idyll. "It's full of the yawns of young people, still in their 20s, who have found success and take it quite glibly," says Baldwin.

Baldwin arrived in Wellington to create the work with some strong ideas about how the dancers would have to move. "My work is a lot about the way to use the torso, to speak from the core of the body," he says.

"But a lot of the movements I actually pinched from Wetini," he confesses. "Wetini and I have been doing quite a bit of male bonding and shared some stuff. And I ended up using a lot of his traditional choreographic moves, which are actually battle plans, with the men on the outside and the women inside, or in patterns taken from arrowheads or waka."

The nerves came back again when it was time to work on the closing scene when the two companies take to the stage together.

"I was aware of the need to consider protocol and the fact that we were dealing with a lot of sacred stuff," he says.

In the end he used the concept of tu rehu, the Maori term for the white-skinned fairy people described in their legends, to allow the RNZB dancers to move into Te Matarae's cultural space.

The work is stunning visually, as well as choreographically, with lighting by guru of the art, John Rayment and design by Tracy Grant.

"We didn't set out to recreate Split Enz on stage," says Grant. "They had great sophistication and a wonderful sense of style, and always made a strong, bold, clear statement. They were unique, and we wanted to catch the real essence of that.

"That meant a geometry of line in the costumes and a strong contrast of tone, with black and a primary colour, or white and a primary colour."

But Grant also looked at the work in a bigger frame - as an opportunity to look at what it means to be a New Zealander, and the influences that come to bear on a New Zealander who is creating a piece of music, dance or a painting.

An art magazine with an illustrated feature on Peter Siddell's landscape series became a visual inspiration, supplying a "spectacle of scale" as well as a palette of colours and light. Other iconic New Zealand images were also consulted. Grant sent Baldwin, still in London, pages and pages of images.

"He chose four from about 30," she says. "I could tell immediately from his choices what direction he wanted to take."

Grant was originally commissioned only for costumes, but as the concept developed John Rayment in particular became convinced that a gauge was needed, a backdrop to visually support the reference to landscape.

A huge cyclorama was eventually created, which wonderfully reflects Rayment's brilliantly subtle light play and also presents one of the boldest statements in the work - a huge interpretation of Colin McCahon's famous painting I AM.

Grant has adored working with the ballet company, her first foray into designing for dance.

"It is all so totally visual," she says, "and I am a visual storyteller. In opera you can close your eyes and sit back and just listen. But in dance, if you close your eyes you inevitably miss it."

Everyone can witness Grant's fun. It is there in the dove-grey tutus, all fluffy and feathery but still suggestive of netball uniforms. Watch those tutus, too, during Shark Attack, and their alignment with a dorsal fin. A devastating sequined harlequin jacket simply is the frenzy in FrENZy.

And don't miss the beautiful coat, itself a landscape to rival any in Joseph's dream.

* The Meridian Energy Season of Ihi FrENZy plays at the Aotea Centre from this Wednesday to July 1, and at the Founders Theatre, Hamilton on July 4.