Her new understanding does not extend to sanctioning the Government's decision to join the conflict in Iraq by sending our troops.
"Killing people is a brutal act against humanity," she says, adding that in ancient times warriors were prepared for war religiously, poetically and spiritually through literature, prayer and ritual, which enabled them to survive the violent acts of war. And at war's end there were "rituals of resolution" that eased them back into normal life.
"But all that has disappeared from modern warfare and that is one reason there is so much on-going suffering."
Rotunda premiered in Auckland in 2013 and was invited to the Holland Dance Festival last year. The work received standing ovations at every performance there and won four-star reviews.
Last month McCullagh, Rotunda and the company began a nine-centre Australasian tour, starting in Tauranga and taking in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin before the three-performance Auckland season which culminates on Anzac Day. The company then heads to Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Geelong in Australia.
The grand tour is a huge step-out for the NZDC, which was only established in 2012, and bears witness to McCullagh's wide-ranging skills. The tour is even more significant given the logistics involved in incorporating a live brass band at every port of call.
In Tauranga, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, the New Zealand Army Band under Staff Sergeant Tristan Mitchell proved they were up to all the challenges a contemporary dance programme presented. "Wonderful to work with," says McCullagh.
Mitchell devised the band's choreography, but every venue was different and presented a new set of specifications and adjustments.
In Auckland, the North Shore Brass performed the inaugural season with Don McGlashan as the drummer boy, and will again march into the limelight. Four brass bands will be involved in the four Australian cities.
McCullagh spent a week this month on a whistle-stop tour to set the choreography and run rehearsals, and found musicians "incredibly excited" by the exercise.
The music, which includes traditional hymns and pieces by John Ritchie, Gareth Farr and Don McGlashan, are proving a joy to brass band players and aficionados. McCullagh describes it as "music that cuts to the quick of your heart".
During the evolution of Rotunda McCullagh has invited people, personally and through the NZDC website, to tell their own war stories. "Everyone has a story, a family history of surviving or falling at war, of suffering a crisis," she says, her own included.
And performances have touched many hearts, reflecting back the effects of World War I on New Zealand families, sometimes with cathartic effect. The mateship and male friendship found in war is one of Rotunda's themes, but so is the quiet suffering and buried trauma at the loss of so many people, in such terrible ways, that resulted in so many veterans silencing their grief with bottles of whiskey drunk alone in the garden shed, in the broken hearts of war wives, and the intergenerational damage caused.
"One man in the audience openly wept," McCullagh says, "realising how his father had been so shut down by the unspoken horror of his war. I feel we are giving these people a voice, allowing their spirits to be heard."
Performance
What: Rotunda, with the New Zealand Dance Company
Where and when: Aotea Centre, April 23-25
Creative process of dance captured by constant presence
Photographer John McDermott has tracked the progress of The New Zealand Dance Company for its first two seasons, with 120 images gathered together in a new book,
Process
, released to mark the launch of
Rotunda
. The photos capture the birth and development of an energised new company, dancers full of enthusiasm and daring honing their skills under the tutelage of the company's founder Shona McCullagh.
Choreographer Michael Parmenter has written a introduction which opens:
"The photographs collected in this volume were, with one or two exceptions, taken during the creative process and rehearsals of the first two seasons of The New Zealand Dance Company.
"Language of Living, the company's debut season, was a repertoire programme of shorter works by various choreographers; Rotunda was a full-length work created by company artistic director Shona McCullagh. Both programmes involved numerous collaborations with other artists - composers, designers, dramaturges - but to the degree that he participated in creating primary images and recording the creative process of both of these programmes the constant presence throughout, aside from that of the dancers, was photographer John McDermott. John is a respected photographer with numerous exhibitions and books to his credit, and this is not the first book of his to record the creative process of dance and theatre arts. [See Truth by Illusion (1999), Craig Potton Publishing.]
"It is in this project however, focusing as it does particularly on the creative process of dance alone, that the tension, even the paradox that exists between dance and photography, between a temporal process and the captured moment, is brought to the fore."
Process (Umbrella with support from Creative NZ in association with the NZ Dance Company $65) is out now, with a signed, numbered, limited edition of 500 copies.
